Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Here.

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:21:02 GMT

We have arrived in California in one piece, and the promised wireless at the hotel is actual wireless at the hotel.

I went and checked the little box on my ticket that said I wanted wheelchair assistance, and so I got it, no fuss. The lovely little Somali woman who took me through ticketing and security was fairly adamant that markgritter and timprov must be brothers, but this is a minor inconvenience. Checking the box in advance FTW. Because, seriously, folks, it was hard enough to deal with turbulence, takeoff, landing, the little train dealie to the rental car, etc., without having to haul my butt through airports pulling someone's arm out of his socket. Round and round and round. Uff da.

But the hotel is good, and soon there will be Cuban food, so there's that.

Books read (early May) and other stuff

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:02:42 GMT

The other stuff first: the plan to get me a new desk has taken another step forward: markgritter disassembled timprov's old desk and reassembled it in the basement to be a home for some of his new work stuff. So now there's room for me to get a new desk or computer table. Of course, that would involve shopping for one, so we won't be planning on that happening any time soon. Still, it's best for my back if I don't try to write another book on this desk. It's lovely, and I'm very glad to have it, but it was not designed to be a computer desk, because when it was designed, computers took entire rooms. Not small ones, either. The immediate result of all this is a lovely open space for doing PT, and a pile of the stuff that was in timprov's old desk and didn't get transferred to his new desk or a file box. He'll take care of that when we get back from California.

This trip to California is a weird length. It's not "clean out everything fresh from the fridge" length, but it's also not "it'll all still be good when you get back" length, either. It's not "stop the mail" length, but the mail will be a pile to deal with. And to make it stranger, markgritter is staying longer than I am, so we can't pack together but have to do two toothpastes and like that.

And now, books read. The way to read a lot of books is apparently to read old mysteries and juveniles. If I was reporting on books I didn't finish, I think this would be a record fortnight. But I'm not, so it's merely a large-ish one. And, I think, a good one. I fell head over heels for a couple of series. I am not saving later books in series for later these days. This is the rainy day on which I'll want to have more of various things to read.

Eleanor Cameron, The Court of the Stone Children. This is the Eleanor Cameron who did the Mushroom Planet books, so I thought I'd look into this one. It was okay, but I do wish people would either leave quantum mechanics alone when they're writing ghost stories, or else acknowledge that quantum mechanics does not actually explain their ghost story in any way. Or else...I don't know...maybe learn something about quantum mechanics beyond the "um, there's this cat, right?" level.

Cecil Castellucci, The Queen of Cool. This was a fine enough mainstream YA, in which the eponymous character (a high school girl) learns some things about herself and other people and also zoo animals. What I'm wondering -- and this is not a rhetorical question if anyone has a good answer for it -- is who the audience is for this type of YA novel. Is it read by the girls who consider themselves the cool ones at their school? The girls who wish they were? The girls who enjoy seeing the cool girls figure out that their values are screwed up? How old are the readers of this kind of YA? With speculative YA, I have some idea of the range of answers to these questions; with mainstream, not the foggiest.

Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, and The Sibyl in Her Grave. This is the first of the things I fell in love with. pameladean spotted them looking for something else she was going to lend me, and she thought they might be the thing, and they were. I gulped them down as fast as I could manage while still reading something else between volumes. So very fine. For the record, I read Hilary Tamar as entirely female -- if Lois Bujold was lanky and British, she would resemble my concept of Hilary Tamar in some key details -- but I am not the least bit argumentative about this. (For those who haven't read it, Professor Hilary Tamar is the narrator, and a gender is never assigned to Professor Tamar.) The thing I wished someone had told me about Patrick O'Brian I will now tell you: Sarah Caudwell is funny. There were a few scenes that made me clutch the couch and laugh and laugh. I did wish that there had been another last volume in the series besides The Sibyl in Her Grave, but I'm told one can't have everything.

Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop, The Case of the Gilded Fly, Holy Disorders, Swan Song, Love Lies Bleeding, and Buried for Pleasure. Sometimes Crispin gets a bit patronizing; a great deal more often, his detective character, Gervase Fen, does. I wonder, thinking of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, whether it's a hazard of the profession? But anyway I've been tearing through these and enjoying them well enough, although I haven't fallen in love.

David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. In which we confirm that a vertiginous Mris does not mix very well with nonfiction. It was, I think -- not having read any other Kipling bios -- a pretty balanced biography. Gilmour stayed at arm's length throughout, able to approve and disapprove of his subject when it seemed fitting, able to place him within the context of his time but also point out where his worse behavior couldn't be excused by it. I don't think Gilmour attempted to make Kipling any less difficult, but he also didn't attempt to make him any more difficult to make the book more "colorful." (Still and all, I had stuck The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714 in my bag to go to California, and I've pulled it back out again. It can wait for me to be less vertiginous.)

Diana Wynne Jones, Witch's Business. One of the convenient things about getting my library books online is that I can open my "books read" file and compare it with the listing for a prolific author to fill in the gaps in my reading. This was apparently her first book, and it's not one of my favorites of hers, but it was entertaining, and it was sort of neat to read the first one after reading severalmany of her others, to see the germs of some ideas that were developed better later.

Justine Larbalestier, Magic Lessons. I don't always like the middle book of a trilogy best, but it's the way to bet, and I certainly liked this one better than its predecessor. Which I didn't dislike, or I wouldn't have read this one. Still. It was definitely the sort of middle book where you had to remember the events and characters pretty well from the first book, because not a lot of time was going into refreshing you, but that was fine.

Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel and Indigo's Star. This is the other series that is a newfound love. Oh goodness. I added all five to my wishlist immediately (and will be getting the other three from the library right away when we get back from California, or if not right away, at least as soon as I can manage it). The thing that the Bagthorpe books has when it's Grandpa and Jack and Zero, and less so with the other Bagthorpes? This series has that. It's gentler than the Bagthorpes, and the zany bits are less over-the-top. And I love the characters, all of them, down to Saffy's best friend's dad fixing the fountain. And I love the way that when Hilary McKay tells you it'll be all right, she's not telling you it'll be perfect, she's not telling you it'll be what you want, she's telling you that with the people you love, you can cobble together something, and it'll have bits in it you didn't dream of in what you thought you wanted. <3 <3 <3 <3

Jean Merrill, The Toothpaste Millionaire. This is the author who did The Pushcart War -- several of the things on my library list were along the lines of "I liked that one thing -- did they do another?" This was not as good as The Pushcart War, but it was quick and fun.

Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands, A Shilling for Candles, The Daughter of Time, and To Love and Be Wise. One of those was a complete accident. Unfortunately, my phrasing for being sarcastic about this sort of accident is, "I tripped and fell on an open copy of The Daughter of Time," and that's no longer immediately recognizable as a joke, I'm afraid. But I only intended to read the ones I hadn't read before, but it'd been a decade since I read The Daughter of Time, and there it was in the omnibus, and there I was on the couch with a snuggly dog on my shoulder, and...well, you can see how this sort of accident happens. Anyway, I think this is one of those times when having appropriate expectations is a good idea: I didn't go into this thinking that one of these would be another Brat Farrar or Miss Pym Disposes, and they weren't, but they were fun Tey mysteries anyway. One of them features no known or demonstrated/witnessed corpse, so it would technically be a disappearance mystery rather than a murder mystery, which I like; I like it when series detectives solve other crimes than outright murder sometimes. It's sort of like the opposite of having to raise the stakes in every book so that if you've saved the universe in this book, you've saved three or four universes in the next.

Ursula Vernon, Nurk. It's about a shrew. There are lots of dragonflies. It's by the person who did the art in our kitchen. Do you need more than that? I'm really not sure you do.

Scott Westerfeld, The Risen Empire and The Last Days. I am not on the list of people who are sorry Scott Westerfeld is writing YA. As heretical as it may sound, I have liked several of his YAs better than The Risen Empire. I like several of his YAs kind of a lot, though, so I certainly wouldn't advise against the space opera weirdness of The Risen Empire. As for The Last Days, jenfullmoon warned me that it was less "let's save the world" and more "Dude, we're in a band!!!!! Oh, and also we'll have to save the world. Because the future of the band is at stake!!!!!" And she was right, but that wasn't actually my problem with it. My problem with it was that I didn't feel like the band stuff resolved all that well. Also, not enough parasitology. Sigh.

Uncle Fourth Street Wants You!

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:23:52 GMT

So. The next con for which I have a membership is Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, which is about ten minutes from our house and will be full of awesome. June 20-22. You should definitely come if you possibly can. Lots of people have said this elsewhere, and they were right; listen to them. The registration deadline is not until May 31; if you don't pre-register, you can still come, but registrations are more expensive at the door. Go! Register! Frolic! Rejoice!

However. Several people have said to me, "I can't make it this year. Maybe next year." And oh my dears, conventions are not like violets. They do not spring up of their own accord in green and shady places. You cannot be sure that they will be there the next year, and the next, and the next. For why? Because conventions are work. And while we already know it will be awesome, if it is too small and awesome, the people who are doing the work might not be able to do it next year, or might not be able to find other people to do it next year.

And what can you, as a person who is unable to come this year, do about this problem? Why, I am so glad you asked, amiable reader! You can print this flier here, and you can take it to your local SF bookstore, or your local SF club meeting, or wherever else you think it might be of interest -- colleges sometimes have bulletin boards with announcements about conferences, and I don't see why eager college fabulists oughtn't to know about this, if you know some. And so on. I don't say you should post it at your local grocery store, but if you can think of interesting people who might not know about this event and might want to know, that would be exceptionally handy, and they and we would all thank you for it. And then the odds that there would be a next year's Fourth Street would increase by a non-zero amount, so you'd have another chance at it! See how this makes everybody happy? Mostly me?

Milestone

Tue, 13 May 2008 23:12:35 GMT

Today for my midday PT exercises, I stood on a pillow for an entire minute with my eyes closed without falling into the wall even once.

I didn't repeat the feat at the evening session; I fell into the wall three times. And some of the other exercises are still making me really ill. Still, this is the very first time, and it's progress, progress, measurable progress. Definitely time for a woohoo.

(That was your cue.)

Five Things on a Tuesday Morning

Tue, 13 May 2008 15:16:50 GMT

1. As I work on "Five Ways to Ruin a First Date" (which is about radio astronomy), I keep thinking, "Perhaps I'm not being subtle. Perhaps I'm merely being obscure." I keep putting in e-mails to people, "I can only do this as I can do it." Which is true but not perhaps ultimately helpful.

I refuse to do the kind of prose that jumps up and down and points frantically at its own subtlety, though. That's just not going to happen.

2. I woke up at 5:15 this morning. Since I was already tired from the weekend, this did not thrill my soul. We're trying a new method of keeping my back from getting quite so banged up with the falls in PT; hope it works. It requires an extremely high-tech solution: a larger rubber ball from Walgreen's. At least Mom got me the swirly sky blue kind.

3. I find I am really, really not emotionally attached to most of the library books I try being any good at all. Of the five I got yesterday, I have already discarded two unread. And this does not bother me even slightly. Go library.

4. I am trying, with moderate though not universal success, not to be cranky with people with the continuing vertigo ick, since it's not their fault. But inanimate objects are not receiving the same consideration. I have been cutting the tags out of shirts with wild abandon. There is one T-shirt I've been sleeping in for over a decade (because physics T-shirts are tough, apparently), with the tag in. No problem. Until this weekend when the Tag! Must! DIE! This seems like a harmless enough pastime, so I'm just going with it.

5. I am instituting a new policy. I am no longer going to listen to my friends making disparaging remarks about themselves without protest. If my friends were making disparaging remarks about each other, I would protest, so I don't see why it should be different when it's about themselves; certainly it doesn't make me any less uncomfortable. I certainly don't expect my friends to pretend that they are perfect and without flaw, but gratuitous self-directed nastiness is not the same thing, and not okay. I don't care to put one of you on the spot and say who it was that inspired this new policy, because it bothers me more frequently than just the one person; if it was just the one person, I would e-mail just the one person.

For handy reference:
X: "I'm worried about this thing, because I have such difficulty getting myself organized."
me: "I'm sorry to hear that. Do you think it'd help to blah blah, or etc.?"

BUT

X: "I am such a disorganized loser!"
me: "Kindly don't speak that way of my friend X."

AKICILJ, the mystery edition

Tue, 13 May 2008 02:40:22 GMT

My library has eighty-four listings for Ruth Rendell books (and audio recordings). Even ruling out that there are some duplicated in different formats, that's a lot to choose from. What I've read so far: Means of Evil and Other Stories and Talking to Strange Men. I was particularly impressed with the latter. Any Rendell fans have particular opinions about where I should go next?

Flour, sugar, and not falling over.

Mon, 12 May 2008 13:21:04 GMT

I miss baking. I want to make chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and our recipe for chocolate cake involves boiling things on the stove before mixing them with the flour and sugar, so it's really not something I feel safe doing at this stage of the vertigo. I also want to make oatmeal raisin spice cookies. And scones. And the first strawberry shortcakes and the first strawberry crisp of the season. Note that this is not the same thing as missing baked goods. My mom is where I got this stuff, and my mom is ten minutes away, and if I said, "Momma, could I have one of our chocolate cakes? Because I think I might actually be hungry for that," then poof! there would be chocolate cake. But I am not hungry for that. I want to do the bit where you make it. And that is where my interest ends.

Sigh.

Stuff.

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:58:20 GMT

This week I have friends in from out of the country, and I have my grands and my Onie in from out of town, and it's my brother's birthday, my godson's birthday, and Mother's Day.

Also I am doing PT three times a day, and you all know by now how that feels under this circumstance, and I'm trying to get some writing done and keep the house from completely falling apart. Also I have two medical appointments coming up (one PT, one totally routine allergist visit).

Also markgritter has two conference-dealies to attend.

And then we're going to California.

So what I'm saying here is, if you don't hear from me when you expect you otherwise might, don't panic. It's just sort of being like that for awhile.

California planning (on such a spring-ish day)

Tue, 06 May 2008 17:24:05 GMT

Okay, so here's the plan:

What: dinner with me, markgritter, timprov, and whichever other amiable persons might make their presences felt. This is not an "invite your third cousin's roommate's boyfriend" sort of event, but if you have partners or children or houseguests lying around, go on ahead and bring them.

Where: Jing Jing, on Emerson just off University Ave. in Palo Alto. If you would ordinarily think of walking somewhere from CalTrain (that is, if you are not me or in a similar circumstance to mine), they are within walking distance of the CalTrain station. They have vegan entrees. Despite the website's claims, they serve food that is not astonishingly spicy as well as fairly spicy food.

When: Monday, May 19, at 6:30 or thereabouts. (Not next week. Week after.) One of the reasons we chose Jing Jing is that they're very amiable about people pulling up another chair when needed. We will linger over dinner, and we will probably get gelato or something after, so if the timing seems like it might be tight but you might be able to make it after all, call my cell. If you don't have my cell number, e-mail me and I will tell you what it is. If you think you can't make it until 7, don't worry, we'll get soup and/or appetizers and take our time.

Please let me know if you think you're coming. My default assumption will be that you are not coming, which will save those of you who are in London or Boston or White Bear Lake from having to comment or e-mail me with your regrets. This includes those of you who expressed interest from my last post: I'm not assuming that interest equates to ability, so please do let me know. As I said, they're amiable about people pulling up another chair, but I'd like to know when we walk in whether we're looking for a table for 6 or 16 or what.

Rapid cultural change in a nutshell.

Tue, 06 May 2008 03:11:46 GMT

When Donnie Darko* was set, in 1988, four teenagers jumping on their bikes to go across town in the evening was a reasonable thing.

When Donnie Darko was made, in 2001, it was an historical reference.

Wow.

*Which I watched for the first time tonight.

more damn vertigo

Mon, 05 May 2008 15:55:11 GMT

Okay, let's try something. Indulge me a minute.

Look up.

How long did it take you to decide which direction "up" was? Did you, in fact, think through the possible directions and make a decision? Or did you just...y'know...look up?

That is one of the things -- one, not the whole -- that happens with my PT exercises. If I am standing in the corner doing head movement exercises with my eyes closed, less than halfway through the set of exercises, I lose track of which way is up and which way is down. I have to consciously think, "up is away from your shoulder; move your chin away from your shoulder." Every time. For at least forty repetitions. Three times a day. Every day. The sensory disorientation does not go away when I open my eyes; then I have the visual cues in addition to the proprioceptive ones. But what I do not have is the one that you, unless you also have vestibular problems, just used automatically. I don't have the essential sense that up is up and down is down.

In my family, "she was so tired she didn't know which end was up," is an expression often applied to toddlers, sometimes to bigger people than that. It works the other way: not knowing which end is up is exhausting. And it is very, very literal. I know which end is up right now because my monitor and my computer have strong black vertical lines, and I am looking at them. My desk chair is currently locked so that it can't tip back, because if it could tip back, I would not have a sense of when it had. I can have the "I have leaned back too far and am flailing to keep from falling" reaction when a normal person would have it; I can have it at a few degrees off vertical; I can have it when I have not moved. It comes upon me at unpredictable intervals, and I have to correct for it every time, or fall.

It has been this way for months. They tell me it will be this way for months more. And one of the very hard things about it is that there are things I can't talk about without giving a misleading impression of whether it was a good or a bad experience. If, instead of point three in the previous entry, I'd written about how exhausting and frustrating it was to navigate MIA trading off which family member had my arm, it would have sounded like I'd had a bad afternoon. I didn't. I was with markgritter and my folks, and we looked at flower arrangements and more permanent kinds of art, and it was good. But writing about the reality of the vertiginous aspect of it would make it sound like it was bad, like I'd had a horrible time. I didn't. MIA patrons were no more inconsiderate, no more physically rude, than strangers anywhere else. And that's the problem: that even the good days, even the good times, are really exhausting and a lot of trouble. They are worth the trouble. They are worth the exhaustion. I feel it's generally a good idea to work for the good things in your life, even when the good things are smaller and the work is harder. But what frustrates me is that I seem to have a choice between describing the hairy, frankly awful details, and having them swamp the idea that it was a good time, or else not describing them, and having people assume that they're going away, that I must be feeling better or I wouldn't be out and about. I'm not. I'm just going completely stir-crazy.

Every week of PT, I think, "All right, this is the hardest bit." I think I'm going to keep thinking that until it's over. Because I think it's going to keep being true.

Mrissa's Correct And Cranky Rules for a Monday Morning

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:30:14 GMT

(applicable other days as well)

1. It turns out that legality is not the only standard of behavior required in civilized circles. If pointing out that you have broken no laws is all it takes for your circle of acquaintance to approve of your behavior, you need a better circle of acquaintance. This is true of presidential candidates, of Harry Potter RPGers, and of any other circle you care to name: it being legal to do something does not make it kind, tasteful, interesting, or a dozen other things that a person might wish it to be.

2. Until nanotechnology progresses further than it has to date, neither soaps nor linens are traps for the young or unwary guest, nor should they be treated as such. If you don't want someone washing their hands with something, don't put it in a soap dish by the sink. If you don't want someone drying their hands on something, don't hang it on a towel bar in the bathroom or set it on the bathroom counter conveniently close by if guests are on their way. If you suspect that you have left something unsuitable in the bathroom because your guests have caught you unawares, for heaven's sake dart in and check.

3. If someone is clinging to someone else's arm in a public place, please consider that she may not be doing it for affection's sake, and do not attempt to bully her into letting go. Your failure condition if you navigate around her is that you may have given leeway to someone who is fluttery with new romance: not necessary, certainly, but not catastrophic. Whereas your failure condition if you attempt to bull through her is that you may cause great inconvenience and further suffering to someone for whom walking around in an ordinary fashion is already more difficult than she would like it to be; anticipation of this problem may keep her from useful or enjoyable activities when she's having a difficult day. If you feel the need, you may glare discouragingly in case she's doing it for fun, because by this point she does not give the proverbial rodent's hindquarters what you think as long as you don't try to knock her down.

Hypothetical conversation, real topic.

Sat, 03 May 2008 22:32:35 GMT

So you'll be in California two weeks from now. Yep. Sitting on the sand, basking in the sun.... No, the other California. Sitting on the rocks, basking in the fog? Bingo.

Hey, I thought you felt really crappy all the time. Yep. I thought you weren't able to do normal things like drive and cook and walk unassisted. Yep. I thought riding in a car or on a train or in an airplane made you even dizzier. Yep. I thought you were doing PT sessions three times a day. You can do PT in hotel rooms. I suppose. Still and all, it doesn't sound like the most fun a person has ever had on a trip to California. I expect not.

So what's the deal? My friend Amber is getting married, and one has the general notion that she won't be doing it again so often that one would get bored of it. Do you think she'll be upset with you if you don't come? No. I think I will. Does this have anything to do with ongoing regrets about missing another dear friend's wedding due to vertigo issues? That's a very personal question, hypothetical person! Hush.

Hey! I have just recalled that I am part of the hypothetical livejournal-reading conversation-holding sort of person that lives in Northern California! I hope you're very happy there. And you seem to like me! Probably I do, then; I sometimes give the impression of being willing to be around people I'm only barely willing to tolerate, but if I actively seem to like you, that's hardly ever misleading. It only goes the other way around. So are you going to come see me while you're out there? No. Awww. Why not? Is it because you don't love me any more? Probably. Or else I never loved you to begin with, because ours was a doomed and tragic passion. Seriously, why not? Because I think that this trip is going to be a bit hard on me, and running around the Bay Area would move it from "difficult" into "really unreasonably hard or impossible."

Aren't you going to make any effort at all to see me? Sort of. I am going to plan a restaurant dinner people can attend if they're willing and able. Depending on other pieces of data not under my control, it will be either 5/18 (Sunday) or 5/19 (Monday). Would you like to hear whether I am around either of those nights and interested in hearing more? Definitely. Would e-mail or comments do? Of course. Will this dinner be convenient to BART? Alas, probably not. The wedding is in Palo Alto, so we will probably be getting a hotel in that general vicinity in the interest of not hauling me from pillar to post. Will this dinner be convenient to CalTrain? Quite possibly. If I can't come to dinner, will there be some other opportunity? Probably not on this trip. But, y'know, markgritter's job is in the Bay Area, and timprov and I both have family there as well as friends, so you should expect me to be out there again someday. Possibly even with the middle-ear problems cured. That'd be swell. Tell me about it.

PT retesting report

Fri, 02 May 2008 22:06:00 GMT

Good news is: there is progress since the last time we did these tests a month ago.

Good news is: there is no indication that I am hitting a plateau and will not continue to get better from here.

Bad news is: we're scheduling out at least six weeks' more PT with a retest after that, and probably at least a few more sessions after that. So the dizzy, the falling, the incapacity for doing simple household tasks: we expect this to last a noticeable time longer.

Where's the turbo button on this damn thing?

What today is like

Fri, 02 May 2008 18:38:04 GMT

The thing about going up the stairs on all fours with the stupid vertigo is that it gets a lot more tempting to lie down and have a nap in the middle of them, since I'm already so much closer to the floor anyway.

The thing about feeling this way before I go in for my PT testing and the Purple Room Of Doom -- well, that thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

Books read, late April

Thu, 01 May 2008 13:45:25 GMT

This is, to no one's great surprise, not the year I manage to do May Baskets. Sigh.

Mary Brown, Pigs Don't Fly. This is one of those books that was fine as long as you don't think about it too hard. Having a stubborn, kind-hearted, uncomplaining, fat heroine dragging a motley crew across the countryside makes a nice change from some other fantasy groups; one really believes she could make them all stay together, unlike many other traditional fantasy novel traveling groups. But the issues surrounding her weight are handled weirdly at best and may be really annoying for people who are prone to thinking this kind of thing through whether they want to or not.

Andrew Clements, School Story. One of the things about going through my old library list is that I have long since lost track of why I wanted to read some of these books. School Story is a case in point: it's a perfectly fine juvenile, especially if you are in publishing and want to give your kid a not-too-nitty-gritty look at What Mommy/Daddy/Auntie/Etc. Does. It's quick, it's mildly entertaining, and it's one of those children's books that's really far better for children than for adults. Why did I put this on my library list? I have no idea. I'm not sorry to have read it, but I'm not really knocked over, either.

Edmund Crispin, The Glimpses of the Moon. Mystery novel. Ingenious solution in some ways, but the handling of the village characters was...I think it was meant to be funnier than I thought it was, mostly. I'm told that there are others worth a try, so I will do that, then.

Peter Dickinson, Death of a Unicorn. This is a mystery novel; no actual unicorns were harmed in the writing of this book. It's not at all typical in structure: the realization that there is any mystery to be solved takes much of the book. But that doesn't mean nothing is happening, and the characters' relationships are really well-done.

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother. I've already talked about this one here.

Jon Evans (rezendi), Dark Places. Mystery-thriller with lots of Third World travel: the Himalayas first, and Indonesia, and a bunch of middle Africa throughout and especially at the end. I liked this one very much and would recommend it, but not to people with a strong visual imagination and a weak stomach: the murderer's trademark behavior is, shall we say, a bit gruesome. I'm told that the other stuff he's written doesn't have anything quite that striking in that direction, so I will look for that. But think backpackers, not Bond; it's not the kind of travel where we pretend that people everywhere have the same resources as middle-class First World folks.

Rumer Godden, Pippa Passes. Look, I don't know how to say what I need to say about this book without spoiling it. The first bit is not a spoiler: having "innocence" as someone's central character trait is just not interesting to me. So Pippa is innocent. Hurrah. The second bit...is important, so I will just say it: rape does not depend on gender or sexual orientation. Rape is both wrong and criminal whether you are male or female, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, something in between. Having characters who apparently have authorial endorsement treating it as not such a big deal because of gender, orientation, or both, is not okay. It is just plain not. And if you happen to be somewhere that rape is statutorily defined as forcibly putting a penis in a vagina, sexual assault is still wrong and criminal and needs to be treated as such. I should not have to say this, people.

Lian Hearn, Heaven's Net Is Wide. This is the worst kind of prequel: the kind that acknowledges that the part we really care about is coming later, and just tells us how we got there. Whee. (No midichlorians, though; the bar for "worst prequel" is pretty high.) If you are an Otori fan in general, this is worth your time. Do not start here, though, and if you were iffy on the other Otori books, don't bother.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. If emotional restraint and understatement drives you crazy, avoid this book. Me, I'm from Minnesota. I really liked that the ending didn't make the main character a crazy dancin' fool or something tacked-on like that.

Jane Langton, The Diamond in the Window. Do you want a book that teaches your children the joys of Transcendentalism in as heavy-handed a way as any Hyper-Christian children's author who thinks the Chronicles of Narnia are not Christian because Jesus' name is not on every page? With late '50s/early '60s gender roles to boot? If so, this is the book for you. If not, move along.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below. So I already talked about some of the race issues in this book. That got less overt but not really any better. My options were deciding that this character, Frank, was a complete jerk, or deciding that KSR is a complete jerk. So I went with Frank, being as how he's fictional and all. Problem is, the whole book is about #$%&$#@ Frank. There are a few passages where KSR remembers that, oh, right, I had some other characters around here somewhere; I think they know Frank. But otherwise, it's good ol' Frank all the way. Frank is That Guy who sort of lurks in REI hoping he'll have the chance to Explain Something to a passing female -- he doesn't even care what, because he's sure he Knows More About It Than You -- and you just think, dude, I just want to ~~buy my SmartWool~~ read about massive global climate change and go home, so get out of my way, all right? This is the sort of book that makes me wonder whether we've gone the wrong way with character-driven SF, and maybe another twenty pages of rambling about atmospheric gases would be really what's called for right here -- no? More Frank? Damn. It's not "passing woman," by the way, it's "passing female," because this kind of asshole is always in touch with his primate self, and you think, good, dude, take your primate self to the savanna. Or to Savannah; I don't think I know very many people in either place, so it's all the same to me. I will still probably read the third book, in hopes of the twenty pages about atmospheric gases somewhere. But I totally don't understand the people who complain about the rambling scientific speculation, because, come on, people, our other option is Frank.

S. J. Rozan, China Trade. Engaging mystery despite some totally generic elements and interactions.

Sarah Smith, The Vanished Child. Not Brat Farrar, and not, I saw with relief fairly early on, considering the plot, trying to be Brat Farrar. But like Brat Farrar, I had some difficulty with why the other characters did not suspect the murderer far, far earlier. For several of them, I could go with the "but we know he wouldn't do such a thing" theory, but Reisden came in fresh and was not a sentimentalist; Reisden should have suspected rather thoroughly.

Alexander Stille, The Future of the Past. A series of essays about preservation and conservation of various things: languages, cultures, wildlife, objects, whatever. Some really interesting bits, some stunningly obvious bits, generally worth the time.

Scott Westerfeld, Midnighters 2: Touching Darkness and Peeps. I don't care about vampire books, and I didn't really like the first Midnighters book, so I got these two from the library. Um. It went much, much better than you'd expect. I liked the second Midnighters book a lot better than the first -- the characters were less high school Types and more people to me, and I knew what I was getting into with the numerological conceits and like that. So I'll definitely get the third one from the library. Peeps read to me like a science fiction novel about people with parasites that happened to mimic some but not all aspects of vampirism. The passages about different parasites were gross and engaging and fun, and served to underscore the point that this is an SF novel, not a horror novel. Well-done and worth the time.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters. This was exactly as deep as I wanted from a Jeeves and Wooster novel.

More giving up!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:50:06 GMT

There are a couple of memes going around the friendslist wherein people indicate which books on a list they have read and which they haven't finished reading. And in the, "Dance for me, monkeys!" school of lj posting, I just want to say: talk about it! Tell me why you didn't finish the ones you didn't finish! Did they bore you (and if so, how)? Confuse you (and if so, how)? Require returning to the library? Get left on a train or in a coffeehouse or an airport lounge or your cousin's backseat? Get dropped in the bath and rendered too crunkly to read? I'd far rather read why you didn't finish one book on one of those lists than have fifty of them marked whether you did without explanation.

And in the spirit of dancing for you, monkeys, I give you the reasons I have quit reading library books recently:

1. Chatty piece of nonfiction went from elementary to oversimplifying to flat-out wrong.

2. Point of view issues: the first-person omniscient is extremely difficult to carry off without making me run away, far away, very quickly. If you want to know what someone's aunt was doing at every second of every day, give a mechanism or don't use the first-person.

3. Total contempt for characters. On the author's part, not on my part. I read 50 pages and thought, "If she's so sure these people are all tiresome, petty people, what am I still doing here?"

4 (multiple examples). Mystery novels that started in the following format:
CLUNK: corpse.
CLUNK: some random trivia about our detective, such as her opinion on lima beans, Greenpeace, or the musical career of Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Sorry, folks, but, "Here is a dead body. Mary liked gorgonzola," is just not a way to get me into a book. Even though I like gorgonzola, and even though I have been known to bring it up more or less completely out of the blue (as a few people can attest from this weekend) if my need for gorgonzola overcomes my social filters. But I don't do it in fiction, is the difference.

I'm a little alarmed by this pattern showing up in more than one book. If I wasn't reading mystery novels with far better beginnings than this, I'd begin to think it was a genre convention and despair of my ability to ever write a mystery novel. As it is, it reminds me once again that I don't have book-selection protocols set up for picking mysteries the way I do for picking science fiction and/or fantasy novels. Not a surprise, since I've been working on the latter for much longer. I keep plugging away at it, but I'm not sure I'm seeing much progress.

5. Bad sex between characters. Bad sex can be all right if it's needed in context, but as the opening event of the book, I am going to need to see some reason why I should care about these people who, in this particular case of bad sex, don't care about each other. That context is going to be difficult to establish right out of the gate, there.

6. Main character is a shining gem among Philistines who do not truly understand the deep beauty of her soul but are interested in shallow, worldly things. No irony apparent. Next.

7. Author believes that beautiful imagery excuses her from making any sense whatsoever. Bad enough if I agreed with her on what images were beautiful.

There really are lots of good books I'm actually finishing; it's just that it doesn't take much time to discard the bad ones, or even just the ones that strike me wrong, so I can go through them rather quickly and send them back to the library with no harm done.

Also I have quit work on a particular short story for the time being and have picked up a different story in a different genre. It's going much better than the previous one. Hurrah for quitting.

Little Brother

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:11:59 GMT

The deal was, you could get a free ARC of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother if you agreed to read it and talk about it right away. Sold, says I! So here we are, after rescuing the poor book from the bushes where the UPS man decided to fling it, possibly in a fit of pique.

Friends, this is good stuff. But I am reminded of when Neil Gaiman's Coraline came out, and he discovered, to many people's surprise, that it was a great deal more disturbing to adults than to children. I have friends of all ages, but there's a line somewhere between a few of you who read this lj and are in your late teens and my friend K who is 13. She is not just my friends' kid, but she is my friends' kid, and I am one of her grown-up friends. At this age, it makes a difference. K will be going into high school in the fall. She is old enough to make mildly racy jokes in company, old enough to think through adult discussion and ask questions, old enough to read this book. But I am old enough that if I gave her a copy for her 14th birthday later this year, it would come with apologies. Not for the book itself; the book is extremely well-done. But I am so, so sorry that it's needed. I am so very sorry that this is the book we should give her at this age. "If this goes on" was not moonbases and trips to Mars when I was a teenager, but it was genetic engineering, at least. It had nothing to do with the Department of Homeland Security, because we didn't have one then, and it had nothing to do with torture because in my halcyon teen days, torturers were universally known to be the bad guys. We had room to be angry teenagers, cynical Gen Xers, without someone bringing up how the terrorists would win if we didn't straighten up and fly right. And I am so immensely sorry that my dear K and her equally dear just-younger sibs are coming of age in a world where that's not true.

This is not a book that hides what it's actually saying under coy name changes: the US Department of Homeland Security is called the US Department of Homeland Security, not the "Federal Department of Protecting the Motherland, country unspecified." If you are looking for a book that lets you pretend we're talking about something else, somewhere else, this is not that book. Nor should it be.

It is ultimately a very hopeful book: hopeful about human ingenuity, hopeful about human freedoms, hopeful about communities and not just about individuals, while recognizing that communities are made up of individuals. It has an ear for teen dialog. It has a nose for San Francisco life -- if anybody can tell me where to get burritos like that here in the Twin Cities, I will be in your debt, because they're one of the things I miss generically (rather than House of Nanking in specific, say, or other individual places like that). And it has a distinct feel for family life that understands the adult perspective without assuming that it's always right. This is the right book at the right time.

I'm just sorry that we didn't manage to make this into some other time instead.

In honor of the playoffs

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:00:27 GMT

Today I've done clinic PT (progress: everything that was making me insufficiently dizzy and is now made harder so it will make me sufficiently dizzy and sick again! Yay!), and I'm going to a concert with markgritter and timprov; tomorrow I expect to be completely useless, but these things happen.

But! The completely non-useless news of the day is that On Spec has bought another of the Carter Hall hockey fantasies: "Carter Hall Judges the Lines." Yay! We like On Spec. We like hockey. We like fantasy. We like money. How can any of this possibly be a bad thing?

(This is the one where Carter has to adjudicate among a certain set of three Greek goddesses while also dealing with peewee hockey. Things ensue, as you'd expect they might.)

Straw. Gold.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:12:56 GMT

I should be away from the computer and getting ready for bed, but like Arlo says, you can't always do what you're supposed to be doing. So what I did instead is celebrate International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day by putting a reprint up. Goats' Gold is not a very serious story, but it's free to all who want to read it. Originally appeared in Spellbound, which was a children's magazine. Suitable for the kiddies, and not just by my "cut my teeth on Norse myth" standards. It's not very long, but it's goofy, and it's mine own.

Now don't say I never gave you nothin'.

...and hanging on.

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:55:29 GMT

After that last post, I thought of one more thing I should say when next I was at the computer:

Another question I asked myself about the vanishing friendship in question is whether this person was behaving reasonably and my standards were unusually high because the rest of my family, friends, and cordial acquaintances have been so extremely awesome through this whole PT nonsense. I don't think that's it, either, but I just wanted to say, hey, I notice these things. This could easily have been a very lonely time for me, and everything from major household help to simple words of encouragement have made sure that it is not. It still sucks, lo, mightily to be vertiginous all the time, and I look forward to the day when it's all better. But in the meantime, thank you, thank you, and more thank you. Yes, you.

Letting go

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:00:14 GMT

Several times lately I've had something I've wanted to post to lj about, and I've had to leave the computer for awhile because of the vertigo, and by the time I've gotten back to it, the urge to write the entry was gone. I was going to write about being a "local author" at Career Day at one of the private high schools around here, but that was last Friday, and it's no longer on my mind quite so much. I was going to rant about how the current system of arranging symphony orchestra concerts is the equivalent of selling tickets to a double-header with the Andrews Sisters and Metallica: sure, there are people who like both, but it's not perhaps the most graceful combination ever. I was going to say lots of things, but there was the vertigo, and I didn't, and now I've sort of let go of them.

Another thing I'm letting go of is going to sound silly: it's the book list. Sort of. I will still have my Amazon list and my library list, but the library list is getting mightily consolidated. It used to be five closely written pages (with much crossing-out, but still), plus the file on the computer for things I should look up to see if the library has them. Some of those things have been removed from the stacks since I wrote them down. With some I've forgotten why I wanted to read them in the first place. So I've checked out a big stack of library books that have been on the list for awhile, and I'm going to continue doing that. But I'm also letting go of some books. If it's something our library doesn't have, do I want it enough to get it on ILL? Do I want it enough to buy it? Sometimes yes. But sometimes no. Fairly often no. If not, keeping it written down somewhere doesn't seem to serve much purpose. I'm letting go of the lists as a crutch. I'm using them as a practical aid or not at all. I have known for quite some time that I would never read everything that has ever interested me, and that's a good thing. Means that people keep writing good books. If the lists are going to be clutter rather than leading me to books I want, I don't want them.

There are a few other things I'm trying to let go of, triggered by the vertigo months. I absolutely hate it when people set up traps for other people, the kind that are phrased as, "If you were REALLY my friend, you would..." or, "If you REALLY loved me, you would...." I refuse to do that.

But it's not the same thing to set up traps like that as to realize that some people are not the friends they once were, and some people are not the friends you thought they were. Not everybody has to be your best friend. Not everybody even has to be the kind of cordial acquaintance with whom you interact frequently. But I think there does have to be some kind of feeling that one person is not carrying the whole relationship, whether it's an intense, close friendship or a casual, occasional one. There needs to be some sense of mutuality, whether that means that we exchange lj comments every couple of months or that we e-mail each other daily. And with one particular friend (who has told me that they never read stuff on the internet, so it's not you!), there has been neither the slightest whisker of concern for how I'm doing nor a particularly good reason why not. This isn't like the people who have a new baby, or the people who have a medical problem of their own, or the people in stressful work situations, or the people who never knew me that well in the first place, or...a million other things. It's just the expectation that if there is to be a friendship, it's my job to make it happen. And it turns out that I am not short on monkeys. I am not even short on monkeys who like me and are willing to do something so drastic as write a quick e-mail or make a quick comment once in several months of this difficulty. For quite awhile, I kept thinking that while I didn't actually want to talk to this particular person, I wanted to want to someday in the future. Now...I'm having some difficulty seeing why.

It's probably a sign about the friendship that all of the reasons why this is bothering me are not things that I will miss about being friends with this person -- I was missing those even when this person was around -- but doubts about how I ought to treat people. Have I given enough of the benefit of the doubt? Have I allowed for the way that friendships naturally ebb and flow? Did I talk to this person about things that were bothering me before deciding to just let it go? Am I trying to demand that my health problems should be the center of everyone's life and attention? But I think that's yes, yes, yes, and no, respectively. I think it's okay not to be angry, not to be snarky, not to be hurt, just to be...done. And to feel like you are seeing clearly that it's done, that this is not your friend any more. So I guess I am.

Memo to fellow SF writers:

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:43:35 GMT

Okay, fellow SF writers: Asian-Americans have been a part of America's rich tapestry since before their contributions to the railroads in the mid-1800s. They are us. They are totally normal Americans. Get used to it.

What does "get used to it" mean? It means that you be extremely careful in describing Asian-American female characters using the following words and/or references: exotic; inscrutable; dragon lady; or any martial arts metaphors. When you hit all four in less than ten pages, I will put the book down and gape like a fish. Why? Because the technical term for this is racist bullshit.* And if it's because of a character's viewpoint rather than the authorial viewpoint, you need to show us that fast, lest everybody run screaming from the racist bullshit.

When I pick up a Kim Stanley Robinson novel -- published in this decade, for heaven's sake -- I am totally not prepared for that sort of thing. It caught me completely off-guard. "We need to fix climate change!" -- that I expected. "This inscrutable dragon lady would be a great person to work on that problem!" -- uh, no. Nononono. Seriously, just -- no.

I'm going to give this book a chance to get past this, but it's a worse mismatch than "think of these characters as if they were movie stars!" for me to have such a relentless message that I am to think of this character as foreign and other -- even though she's clearly "good other" rather than "bad other." There is a lot of getting past to be done here. Uff da.

Seriously, "exotic"? No American in ordinary American clothes is exotic, whether her ancestors were from Yokohama or York or Yola. Just -- not.

Aiiiigh.

*You do not get bonus points for avoiding geisha and porcelain doll references; that avoidance is elementary civilized behavior.

Meme, gym class, synopses (numbered for your convenience)

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:34:42 GMT

1. I never tag people to do chain memes, but I've been tagged myself: page 123 of the nearest book to me, fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences, are:

But of course Frank couldn't call him. Even his cell phone might be bugged; and Edgardo's too. Suddenly he recalled that workman in his new office, installing a power strip.

That's from Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below, which I am not reading yet. A friend's manuscript is actually closer than that, but I don't really want to post bits of other people's unpublished work without their permission; it seems like not the thing.

2. Robin has, with impeccable five-year-old logic, decided that what I am doing once a week in the clinic is gym class. When they teach his body to do different things, that's gym class. So it must be with mine as well. And he wanted to know what they were doing in my gym class. I told him they were having me move my head different ways to teach my body not to fall down, and he started demonstrating moving his head in different ways in case any of those might prove helpful to me. He is the best godson ever.

3. I hate writing synopses, but timprov has an insight about them that makes me much more cheerful. "The novel is how you tell the story," he said. "The synopsis is how your Norwegian great-uncle* tells the story." This is very useful indeed.

The Aesir noir novel: Sorkvir Sturlasson gets his fanny in a sling working for the gods. Well, like you do. Uses fancy detective skills to stop Ragnarok, which was his own fool fault anyway. Also there's this girl, doncha know.

What We Did to Save the Kingdom: Ordinal Yaritte gets her fanny in a sling because she can't leave well enough alone. Well, like you do. The king is a young idiot, doesn't that go figure, and folks get worked up about it. And Yaritte can only get them partway calmed down. Isn't that a thing.

And like that. I suspect that having all synopses start with somebody's fanny in a sling might get boring to editors -- American editors; I hear tell that it would provoke quite a different reaction from British editors, as I hear that word is a different euphemism over there -- but I suspect other standard synopsis forms get pretty boring too.

Now I'm wondering which of my other relatives are useful for synopsis purposes. I think it would be hard to mark up a synopsis to indicate where my uncle Bill waves his hands in the air like giant enthusiastic parentheses. Possibly this will only work for generic rather than specific forms of relatives.

*I have more than one. Of course I do. He means the Platonic form of the critter.

Are you sure it has to be a volcano? Wouldn't the washing machine do?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:03:03 GMT

Ista's birthday was Friday. Mark picked out a birthday present for her. It is a soft toy ring. It's so cute one might even say it's precious.

....oh dear.