Linkspam, 5/24/13 Edition

May 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Happy holiday-in-the-US weekend, everyone!  I’m heading down to the mountains this weekend for a much-anticipated visit with my bestie–I hope everyone has a safe and excellent start to the summer here in the northern hemisphere. My regular Monday post will be appearing on Tuesday.

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When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams

May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams

When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams

I picked up Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds on a whim after reading a review of it over at I Will Dare.

As Jodi says, this is a strange and lovely book. It’s not very long–just 228 pages in a small-format paperback–and I do recommend getting the paper version of this: Picador did a wonderful job, deckled edges, French flaps and a lot of care with the design in general.

The genesis of this book is Williams inheriting her mother’s journals after her death and discovering that they’re all blank. Williams starts–quite literally–from the blank pages and works her way around and through her central theme of women’s voices. She also talks about the environment, her marriage, religion, and presence and absence.

This was a hard book for me to read. My mother didn’t keep shelves of blank journals, but she was intensely private and shared very little of her past with anyone–so I really empathized with Williams and the way her mother was, in many ways, a cipher to her.

But Williams is an amazing writer, both lyrical and spare in in prose and able to convey so much meaning through the image of the blank journals and through her other extended metaphor, birds. I found myself wishing I could bring myself to write in this book, to highlight the passages that most spoke to me. Instead, I consoled myself with sticky notes (which I will be removing; I know they’re bad for the paper) and now I share some of my favorites with you:

Erasure. What every woman knows but rarely discusses. I don’t mind erasure if it is done my by own hand. My choice. Write a word. Not the right word. Turn the pencil upside down, erase. Back and forth on the page. Pencil upright. Begin again. Point on the page. Pause. Find the right word. Write the word. Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

 

So moved by the author’s passion for quilts, Mother had one quilt square made by a friend of hers framed, and hung it in her bathroom, where she saw it first thing in the morning. When I asked why this mattered, she said, “It represents how women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.”

 

My mother’s journals area love story. Love and power. What she gave and what she withheld were hers to choose. Love is power. Power is not love. Both can be brutal. Both dance with control. Both can be intoxicating, leaving us out of control. But in the end, it is love, not power, that endures and shows us the consequences of our choices. My mother chose me as the recipient of her pages, empty pages. She left me her “Cartographies of Silence.” I will never know her story. I will never know what she was trying to tell me by telling me nothing.

But I can imagine.

And isn’t this the beautiful truth of love and power?

I really like Williams’s direct way with words. She doesn’t talk around her point, she just makes it with an economy of words that goes straight to the point–her words are sharp and they sometimes cut, but the authenticity and ease of Williams’s voice is inspiring and, at times, revelatory.

This was a hard book to read but it was also a book I needed to read. Maybe you need to read it, too?

Filed Under: Non-Fiction Tagged With: , , ,

Along Came Trouble, Ruthie Knox

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Along Came Trouble, Ruthie Knox

Along Came Trouble, Ruthie Knox

Note: I received this book from the publisher for review. That fact in no way affected my opinion of it.

Ruthie Knox is one of my favorite contemporary romance authors and Along Came Trouble, while not quite awesome as Ride With Me or About Last Night, is still pretty great. And it could just be that I have high standards for Knox’s work, too–I expect a lot from her books because of her track record.

Along Came Trouble is the first book proper in Knox’s Camelot series, which began with an amazing novella, “How to Misbehave”. It’s set a number of years later in the same small town in Ohio and the main characters here are Ellen and Caleb.  Caleb is Amber’s brother, recently out of the military and trying to establish his own security business in town.  Ellen is a local lawyer, divorced and with a young son.  Her brother, Jamie, is an international superstar and he’s taken up with Ellen’s pregnant neighbor, Carly–bringing the paparazzi to the wholly unprepared small town.

This is a book about interdependence and independence both–this provides most of the tension in the book, in fact. Caleb has been hired by Jamie’s security company to provide security to both Ellen and Carly. Ellen wants none of it and Carly isn’t particularly enthusiastic either. And, in both their cases, it’s completely understandable: Carly and Jamie are on the outs and Ellen has fought hard to be her own person outside her brother’s shadow and with a detour through an abusive marriage.

I’d been putting off reading this because I wasn’t sure it would live up to Knox’s other books. I shouldn’t have been worried about that because it does. All the characters are thoroughly believable and a major part of that is because Knox gives them all lives outside the pages of the book–it’s obvious that they’re each the heroes of their own stories even if we don’t know what that story is.  I found this most apparent in Caleb’s parents, Janet and Derek. Between the events of “How to Misbehave” and this book, Derek Clark has had a stroke which has had far-reaching impact on his ability to maintain the apartment complex owned by him and Janet.  This is a source of contention between them and Caleb tries to help where he can–the main reason he moved back to Camelot after his stint in the military was to be able to help his family out.

Relationships between parents and children (and grandchildren) is a major theme of this book. Ellen is so fiercely independent in part because her mother focused all her energy on her brother. Carly was raised by her Nana, who is one of my favorite characters ever (I am firmly on the Nana needs a story of her own bandwagon–are you listening, Knox?).  Ellen’s son, Henry, spends several days a week with his paternal grandmother but only a few hours a week with his father (due to Richard being an emotionally abusive alcoholic with a pathetic leather vest). Being able to see the characters in community with each other, in their other relationships makes them feel so much more real which then makes them more sympathetic and believable.

This is also, in places, a very funny book. Knox has a knack for capturing the little moments between characters. I especially liked the following passage:

“I know, but we skipped all the early dates, and I could really use one of those third-date neck massages.”

“The kind where we watch a movie and then I move back behind you on the couch and rub your shoulders, and you offer to take off your shirt to make it easier, and then before we know quite what happened, we’re making out?”

“Exactly. But don’t skimp on the massaging. I have to be seduced slowly, like I don’t really want it.”

There may have been audible and knowing snorting when I read that bit. Knox is also good at cutting to the heart of emotional matters, as she does when Ellen is thinking about her and Jamie’s father, who they never knew:

Theirs had died before they were old enough to remember him. It was a phantom-limb situation: you got used to the absence, but you could always feel it, and sometimes it itched.

This might be the best description of what it’s like to have a dead parent that I have ever read. Ever.

The only real flaw in this book, for me, was the compressed timeline (although the week or so that this book covers does not end in an engagement or even anything more definite than “let’s try to have a relationship”; there is an epilogue that takes place a few months later). Caleb and Ellen seemed to move incredibly quickly from meeting to realizing that they could have something really great together, especially considering the degree of stress they’re under due to Jamie’s stormy relationship with Carly.

I also tend to have problems with books where there’s a book-world celebrity in it–it always feels really contrived in a way that I have a hard time explaining.  However, in this book it made perfect sense–and it was made clear that Jamie’s celebrity was the result of a lot of hard work on his part as well as natural talent. I liked seeing Jamie chafe at the restrictions his celebrity put on his life and the way his actions were shown to have repercussions on people outside his bubble of famous–again, this is a character in community with others.

So to sum up: Great characters and great relationships, and the only real flaw is the really fast development of the relationship between Ellen and Caleb.  This is a wonderful book.

Filed Under: Romance Tagged With: , ,

Linkspam, 5/17/13 Edition

May 17, 2013 by 3 Comments
Strongylodon macrobotrys Andrew Zuckerman :: flowerthebook.com

Strongylodon macrobotrys
Andrew Zuckerman :: flowerthebook.com

Finally but certainly not least: this was Donna’s last week as a regular here at the Radish. I am going miss her posts and I know I’m not alone. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Donna in this particular endeavor. And thus, for her, a lighthouse. She knows why.

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Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

Most people who are familiar with Scott Meyer’s name know him as the author of the webcomic Basic Instructions. Off To Be The Wizard is Meyer’s first novel, a time-travel fantasy that leaves the heavy lifting to other writers and sets out to offer the reader nothing much beyond a good time. For the most part, Meyer succeeds at this goal.

I feel compelled to start by pointing out that this book is self-published, and Meyer might want to make use of a professional editing service for future books—it’s riddled with misspellings and missing punctuation, mostly in the form of quotation marks missing around chunks of dialogue, which drives me bananas. Also problematic, to me, is the hand-waving away of sketchy plot points within his premise—there are vague explanations for these, but they’re deeply unsatisfactory. I don’t demand my fantasy novels have a factual basis in general (because, hey, fantasy), but when you start explaining away some things, you have to explain them all away in order to maintain some internal consistency.

So here’s the deal: a 20-something geek working a dreary, dead-end job (unspecified past the dreary and dead-end parts) who spends his spare time poking around in various corners of the internet stumbles upon a buried file. Out of habit, he pokes around in the unguarded file and discovers that it contains his name and basic info. On a whim, he adds two inches to his height in the file, and is surprised to find himself growing two inches. This leads to more poking around, and Martin Banks soon discovers that the human race is basically nothing more than a giant computer construct. From there it only takes a little computer, er, wizardry to figure out how to teleport and how to time travel, two skills he figures out how to manage by developing crude apps for his smart phone. Martin is smart enough to realize that he may, in the future, need an escape plan in case whomever oversees this file figures out that he’s messed around with it.

Martin decides the best place to escape to is the past, and chooses a benign time in the Middle Ages in England as his escape destination, figuring he can pass off his new crude skills as magic and himself as a powerful wizard. He’s forced to put his plan into action quite soon when all of his monkeying around with his bank account lands him in trouble with the Treasury Department. Dressed in Slytherin robes, Martin teleports himself back in time, landing outside the village of Leadchurch which, unfortunately for him, already has a wizard in residence. So the locals aren’t exactly impressed. Been there, done that.

As a premise, this has loads of potential, and Meyer milks it pretty well. He also doesn’t waste any time setting it up, which has positives and negatives. On the one hand, there’s not much in the way of info-dumping here. On the other, there’s not a lot of detail—one page, Martin is running from the feds and the next he’s hit his escape app and landed outside Leadchurch. But on the plus side, the swift removal of his character to the Middle Ages allows Meyer to get down to business and have a little fun.

See, it turns out ALL the wizards in his new time period are actually time-travelers who’ve come from various decades. Like Martin, they chose to escape to the Middle Ages thinking it’d be easy-peasy to pass their ability to manipulate the file off as magic. Eventually, they all created a shell file to standardize their wizardry. Leadchurch’s Wizard-in-Residence, Philip, takes Martin under his wing, offers to train him up in the use of the shell program so that he can pass the Wizard Trial, and shows him how to live a modern lifestyle in the Middle Ages. So Martin gets some snazzy robes and a hat, makes a staff, and eats a lot of stew while learning to pull burritos out of his hat, fly, and transport his bed from home to his hut in Leadchurch. He also meets a clutch of other time-travelers/wizards and begins to make friends.

The set up gives Meyers a chance to make zillions of funny pop culture references about everything from The Simpsons to Apple computers to Pontiac Fieros, and Martin’s adventures in learning his new trade are genuinely amusing. The problem, which you’ve no doubt figured out by now, is that these people all need computers to access the shell and make their tricks actually work because in this world, wizardry is actually nothing more than a series of macros that are created to respond to vocal commands, and there was no electricity in the 1300’s to run the computers on. Meyer gets around this difficulty by letting them use the shell to create certain fields around themselves and objects to preserve a constant, which is actually fairly clever—they can create fields to maintain their body temperatures at a constant level of their choice, and, more important in the world-building sense, they can create fields that will allow their computer batteries to forever remain at a full charge. Because Meyers is working from the premise that all of life is basically a computer construct, he can get away with this—manipulate the program to get whatever you want, be it a burrito or fully-charged computer battery.

Where it all gets a bit hand-wavy is with the use of cell phones and cell phone apps to control things. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how their smart phones could actually work in the Middle Ages. Because they can carry them back and forth, and they can conserve the battery charge at a permanent level, but it’s a fact that my cell phone, full battery or not, will not work if I’m in a dead spot. And I can’t think of a bigger dead spot than the 1300′s. I finally just gave up and waved my hands too. It was easier than imagining cell phone towers dotting the landscape of medieval England, and Meyer at no point described how they might make this work.

Martin has more adventures once he becomes a fully-trained wizard, and Meyer leaves himself enough room that he could easily make this into a series if he’s so inclined. I found this a fast, entertaining read. It’s not going to win any points for style, but it’s told in an engaging, undemanding fashion. My biggest issue with it was that the characters never really bloomed: they each seemed to have an assigned character trait (Martin, for example, is impulsive, while Phillip is very steady and conservative) and didn’t ever grow or change along the way; the result is that they’re not really driving the plot, just walking through it. If he does carry on with these characters in a series, he’ll need to work on that. But he has a very promising foundation to build on.

Filed Under: Fantasy Tagged With: ,
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