Fun Fiction-SciFi Fix

I do a lot of "light" reading. I have always been a voracious reader—I was the kid walking to school while holding a book in front of my face— I would read anything and everything, and my first degree is in Comparative Literature. But as an adult I find myself drawn to lighter, escapist reading. That is why I am grateful for my Book Club (called the Book Club) because it pushes me to read more literary fiction and even some non-fiction and memoir.

But at heart I love a good sci-fi space opera. I think my life involves so many "little" stresses—driving kids to after school activities and doctors appointments and dog to vet appts and showing up at the school meetings and concerts, that it is nice to have a reading experience that is wholly restful and not wrenching, deeply thought provoking and life-changing—not that there is not a time and place for that kind of reading! But not in my life. Not today.

This is all a long prelude to confessing that I have spent the last few months re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold's 15 book Miles Vorkosigan series. I jumped into the series this time at book #4, The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga Book 4), which is the beginning of the life and times of Miles Vorkosigan, whom I just love. He is a daring, brilliant, moody, young member of the Vor Class with all the weights and responsibilities of his high caste, and and he is tortured by physical deformities which make him a target in a mutation-phobic society. Yet he manages to take us on a non-stop thrill ride through a far future galaxy that is richly developed throughout the series.

I am not Miles' only fan. The books have garnered 6 of scifi's highest awards (Nebula, Hugo and Locus) as well as a dozen nominations in those categories. Also several listings on the New York Times Best Sellers List.


If you have the winter-blues, I recommend this escape!

Why Are We Fascinated With Tiny Houses? Book Review: The Big TIny

Lately my husband and I have been fascinated with tiny houses. I'm not sure who started it, probably Irad. Perhaps it is an outgrowth of our weeks on the Appalachian Trail, discovering how completely we could meet our food and shelter needs from a backpack. Or our happy experiences doing Outward Bound which were equally unencumbered possession-wise. And yes I know this is a very First World Activity, to purposely scale down from the wealth and luxury of possessions around us as an OPTION.

But I can remember as a 10 year old doing a science project on being a naturalist, and imaging living in a tiny cabin in the woods with one little table and one bowl and the sound of the birds as my alarm clock. Of course I was 10 years old. Of course Irad has that fantasy as a 50 year old!

Somewhere I stumbled on a mention or review of The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir
and ordered it.

 The Tiny House of the title(picture by Stuart Islett for the NY Times)

The book is a delight. It reminds me of Cheryl Strayed Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Vintage).Though they are women at very different stages of life, they are both re-inventing themselves through a very physical quest that involves a lot of DIY learning and creates a lot of blisters and callouses. And they both write very humorously and humbly about their experiences. And both have a very West Coast ethos.

Loft bed looks comfy to me! (picture by Stuart Islett for the NY Times)

 For example, Dee Williams reminisces fondly about the shoes she keeps from the days when she and friends would "drive half the night and then sleep for a few hours at the trailhead, like kittens. We'd push ourselves through the day, sweating and grunting, and hanging by our knuckles as we attempted overly ambitious, nasty clims called something inane...I was strong and eager, and willing to drag myself (and my shoes) on any number of epic weekend adventures." Don't we all remember those days. (Not.) There are many references to outdoor get togethers, and gangs of friends cheering each other on, and having the modern day equivalent of a barn raising party at a key Little House building juncture—a kind of perpetual summer camp for the adult refugees of other parts of the country. So there is that.

The author with the friend whose yard she lives in (picture by Stuart Islett for the NY Times)

But what it leads to is this tremendous savoring of the details of the world. A living IN nature. Or as she herself says in an interview in the New York Times, “In a big house, it’s easier to ignore what’s going on outside,” she said. “Or you’re constantly trying to compete with nature through your thermostat. I’m more into collaborating with nature now.” Some of the loveliest writing in the book is when Williams describes experiencing the world around her through the heightened senses occasioned by living in such a modest and scaled down environment. I ordered the book imagining it would be interesting to page through, and to my surprise I read it cover to cover.

More perspective (picture by Stuart Islett for the NY Times)

The New York Times interview is worth reading and so is the book. Williams has a freshness and hopefulness about life, a kindness in her writing, and a deep appreciation of friends that is untarnished by her years as a toxic waste inspector. Nor is her sweetness tainted by her own terminal illness, whose advent lead her to re-evaluate the amount of time and debt home ownership imposed on her and start to explore a tiny house.

As for Irad and me, I don't know why we are both sending each other emails with links about other tiny homes, such as the recent Container Home Facebook Frenzy, since we have three kids and a dog and will not be fitting anywhere tiny anytime soon...but stay tuned. You never know!

Here are some of our recent shared links on the subject.

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/tiny-homes/

http://www.fourlightshouses.com/  (the guy who inspired Dee Williams to build her own)

http://www.prefabcontainerhomes.org/

http://www.jetsongreen.com/2010/02/ten-things-consider-shipping-container-projects.html
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kristinchirico/surprisingly-gorgeous-homes-made-from-shipping-containers
http://www.realestate.com.au/blog/house-made-of-31-shipping-containers/ 

Book Review: Snow Hunters

Paul Yoon's novel Snow Hunters: A Novelis a gem—perfectly cut and exquisite. Employing minimalistic writing it nonetheless conveys an entire rich and nuanced world. It lies somewhere between the realm of prose and poetry, each sentence is a distillation of language, and as such it is powerfully evocative.

The book has the feeling of a fable, images and events evoke universal experiences, yet it manages to tell a complete and coherent story. As I read I felt like I was immersed in an impressionistic piece, but in recounting the story to someone else, I realized that by the end of the narrative every detail had been filled in. Names, dates, events...it is a story of war, displacement, loss, and love and at times was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes.

This is not a cheap read, but nor is it overly intellectual. Utterly approachable and every member of my book club seems to have loved and appreciated it equally - so much so that we are reading Paul Yoon's short story collection for next month.

It is great to live in a world where there are so many forms of genius to astound and delight!

Book Review: Signature of All Things

 


I was not a fan of Eat, Pray, Love. Well, let me be honest. I was a huge fan of "Eat" but "Pray, Love" got a bit much for me. Too much self-expose and precious prose.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself completely blown away by Gilbert's recent novel (her first fiction since 2000), The Signature of All Things: A Novel.


Now THIS is a book! No cutesy gimmick, no ironic authorial voicing, no sweet and contrived denouement. Just good solid plotting, wonderful characters, rich setting and careful, but submerged, research, and the tremendous act of imagination that makes reading a novel more fun than sitting around having a conversation with oneself!

I loved this book. I loved the botany, the liveliness of the ideas, the wonderful characters, and Alma herself. Set in the 19th Century, it felt like a 19th Century novel in its Dickensian richness and scope, and full and fleshly omniscient narrator.

A perfect anecdote to winter blues, the book is both a journey of the mind and a journey of the globe, evoking the steamy intensity of 19th Century scientific inquiry (Joseph Banks and Alfred Russell Wallace make actual appearances as characters, and Darwin and Linnaeus are in pages), as well as an homage to the sea faring literature of exploration a la Horatio Hornblower and Master and Commander that I also dearly love.

IF I were creating a mini-course on botany and evolutionary biology in literature, I would include this book, the stories of Andrea Barrett (Ship Fever: Stories and Servants of the Map: Stories, and Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf


And as a nascent, extremely amateur botanical watercolorist, I love that one of the characters is a genius botanical artist and that drawings throughout the book as well as the endpapers contain botanical prints. Worth leaving the Kindle in the drawer for this one.

Gilbert spent three years reading botanical works as well as visiting botanical gardens in preparation for this book, and it shows. Following up a mega-seller memoir with a solid work of fiction is no mean feat and I think we have a serious novelist in the house.

January's Book Reads

Rather than wait for the end of the year and try and remember everything I read, I am approaching it on a monthly basis this year. Here are the books I read in January:



Rite of Passage
This was the book that started it all for me—"all" being my life-long love affair with science fiction. I read this in Middle School, one of the 70's "open schools," hiding out in the attic where I used to go to escape the hustle and overwhelm of classes without walls, teachers without attendance lists, and Becky without friends. The story is about a 14 year old girl who is smarter than average and finds her way through a very grueling rite of passage on a far future ship where the coming of age ritual is one of the ways population is kept trim. I think I really related to this girl and to a society that figures out what your special skills are and cultivates them, at a time when I felt very much lost in the mob and undervalued because of my non-cute cheerleader status.

It is the third time I have reread it and it still holds together as a very good book. Notice that it is still in print! However, I don't recall comprehending the terrible power of the ship and the questionable morality of its rule. Just the story of the girl...

I'm not sure if I read this or Asimov's  I, Robot first, but either way I was hooked. However, I Robot does not work as a re-read. How did we ever swallow that level of sexism and stereotyping?



The next book I read was for the Book Club, and it was an author whose work I had read in the 80's and loved and admired. Andrea Barrett has an enormous gift for bringing to life the powerful passion of natural scientists in eras gone by, just skirting historical luminaries with secondary fictional characters whose stories illuminate the wonder and genius of scientific investigation. Archangel: Fiction did indeed uphold this premise, but the stories were darker, even grim, and leave the reader with a feeling of having just glimpsed a life that has somehow gone amiss. And sometimes even that is not conclusive. The other readers in my group similarly felt let down by the stories, and some even suffered through them.



As I mentioned in my year-end-books post, I am always searching for the eminently readable yet literary detective novel that will take me through at least 20 books of page-turning enjoyment. And, friends (if you are out there), I think I've found it for 2014. Not new at all, just new to me, I discovered Patricia Cornwell's Dr. Kay Scarpetta detective novels, starting with Postmortem (Kay Scarpetta Mysteries). Grisly, gripping, compelling—they are excellent and rife with really interesting scientific and medical data as well as great characters. Not for the faint of heart, I even reached a point in the book where I wasn't sure I really wanted to be reading this level of gruesome detail, but a quick look at the reviews, including the fact that Postmortem won the the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity Awards and the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure,  convinced me to keep going and I am now 5 books into the series with Body of Evidence, All That Remains: A Scarpetta Novel (Kay Scarpetta), and Cruel and Unusual also behind me and the series hasn't disappointed yet.



On a much lighter note in the detective genre, the next book in the Flavia De Luce series, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches: A Flavia de Luce Novel is out, and as promised Amazon delivered it right after publication from our pre-order. My daughter "Fat Rabbit" and I traded it back and forth and were both delighted to continue the adventures of Flavia, though we agreed this one had some flaws that earlier ones did not, jumping around all over the grounds for no apparent reason, cutting of certain apparent plot lines, but eventually resolving in a very satisfying way that leaves us to await the further adventures of Flavia, girl chemist and private detective.


And just for fun I indulged in the latest escapades of Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy who to my delight managed to maintain her youthful personality and madcap-ness into her, gasp, 50's! Helen Fielding manages to pull off another plot variation of the age old Darcy gets girl, wiht a few oops along the way and lots of fun and I did actually catch myself laughing out loud while reading it waiting in line somewhere.



Because I am a great fan of Ann Patchett's after hearing her speak at Writers Center Stage last year,  I went out and got her new collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Well the girl can write, and each essay is really a perfect gem. However the whole book en masse starts feeling like a little too much of the perfect point of view. They say every Rabbi has one sermon and every writer has one story, and when the essays are strung together in this way, I started feeling that one-story repetition, just because it is the SAME person telling each (wonderful) story. I am sure it is just me because the reviews are insanely wonderful. But I would recommend reading one of these each month, to be brought into the freshness, humor and clarity of Patchett's world anew, rather than over and over again, and then it would be fun each time.

I shout out to "Fat Rabbit," (as always, names changed to protect the innocent) my daughter and fellow book worm, who reads on the bus, at the dinner table and even while walking to school—for helping me sort my reading pile. We both are always ordering books at the library, going to pick them up and returning with everything we ordered plus an additional pile. And we both wind up having several piles that we circle in confusion, wasting precious reading time trying to figure out which book we are actually reading. In a moment of inspiration, during one recent snow day, she suggested we sort our piles and decide IN ADVANCE what we are reading next. It has served us both very well. Here are our piles—white slips of paper are stand ins for books we have in our Kindles so that they are in the queue as well. Thank you Fat Rabbit!

Book Review: Just Kids by Patti Smith

It seems there is suddenly an amazing harvest of rock memoirs available. As a child of the 70's I grew up on rock and roll and as a teenager deeply regretted having missed the 60's. Now all the rebel stars I listened to have become the revered sages of our age; the hippies and freaks are now our tribal elders. And they are all rich and famous and impressively eloquent. Moved positions from "never trust anyone over 30" to modeling how hip 60 and even 70 can be. And now, like good elder statesmen and women, they are gifting us with their reminiscences.

My first foray into this field of literature was Patti Smith's memoir, which is about her very early years, how they lead to her meeting Robert Mapplethorpe, and how the two of them, deeply in love, became the nexus of the beat/rock/art scene in the last 60's and early 70's.

Part love story and tribute to Mapplethorpe, and part documentation of an era, the book flits between autobiography, eulogy to a lost love, and zeitgeist roman. And it is equally successful on all fronts.

First and foremost, from the first paragraph on, I was struck by Patti Smith's voice. I have been a fan of her music since my teens, and I still have her iconic "Horses" album in vinyl and her latest "12" digitally. I have turned many people on to her music.

But I knew nothing about her. Based on her raw, punk look and hoarse, expressive sprechstimme singing style, I just assumed she was a drugged out, possibly gay, hard living rocker. But this is not the woman who emerges from the book at all!

Wholesome, spiritual, deeply artistic, loyal, loving, nurturing and wholly without anger or rancor. She is warm, down to earth and utterly lyrical. Writing of her childhood in the late 40's and 50's, growing up in a very working class Catholic family, I see the world of post WWII that shaped her as well as her fervent religious heart, fascination with books and art, and burgeoning poet's sensibilities. Somehow it reminded me more of "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" than of the expected lurid rock star tells-all.

Her relationship with Mapplethorpe is beautifully portrayed. The absolute childlike love and devotion they shared for each other, the romance of their lives as artists living in what was—though the words were never used— abject poverty, and the wild and wonderful paths their lives followed until they eventually lead away from each other, to separate realizations of fame and glory. He discovers his homosexuality during their time together, but that does not detract from the purity of her love for him.

  Ms. Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1969 (NY Times)

The description of the Chelsea hotel and its clientele, Max's Kansas City and the Warhol factory was sometimes lost on me because there are a lot of names—not all known to me. I had the feeling I was reading through a condensed version of an American Studies class that focused on that decade. It certainly would be a great text for that course, but without looking up every name as I read, I know some of the significance of this aspect of the book was lost on me.

Highly recommended—most of all for the sweetness (a quality I hadn't expected to find) of Patti Smith's voice and her depiction of the magic of her life. There was something almost prayerful between the covers as she shared the wonder and artistry of her generation, without hubris, only her truth. I felt like I would like to sit across a table from her and get lost in conversation, as if I could ever be so lucky...

 Patti Smith (from www.daysofthecrazy-wild.com_)

Addendum: A few days after writing this review I read Scott Turow interviewed in the New York Times Book Review, "When I noticed that Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” had won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2010, I ranted about contemporary culture, so celebrity-besotted that we were now giving vaunted literary prizes to rock stars. Then I read the book. It is profound and unique, a perfectly wrought account of what it means to give your life to art and to another person. I expect it to be read with wonder for a long time." Amen.