Two Books I Spent My Spring Reading

I wouldn't have thought it would be hard to best my meager reading list from last season — I just had to read more than three books this spring. It didn't happen. One big obstacle (nearly removed) was polishing and sending off the final pages of my novel-in-stories. How can a guy read when he's wrapping up a nine-year literary project? Then the ever-generous Veronica S. surprised me with another order of some delicious-looking sci-fi, and I had to read a couple of the books she so kindly sent.

One was As She Climbed Across the Table, which vindicated Jonathan Lethem completely after the disappointment that was Amnesia Moon. I'm almost ashamed that I ever found fault. This short novel has just about everything one wants in a Lethem book. It has a fanciful premise: a woman falls in love with a incorporeal area of null space. It has quirky wit (such as when the narrator muses, "Do you think there are bootleg tapes of Muzak outtakes? Maybe they get excited by the groove and really cut loose sometimes. And the producer says, okay, boys, that was swell but now let's try to get this wrapped up so we can all go home. I'll bet that happens all the time."). It has outlandish character names (Carmo Braxia, Georges De Tooth, Gavin Flapcloth). And it has emotional sincerity that never devolves into gross sentimentality. Yes, I was pleased.

Neal Stephenson wrote Zodiac, a so-called eco-thriller, just a few years before Snow Crash, his prescient novel about VR and the future of the Internet. Snow Crash and William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic were hugely influential on my growth as a geek, so reading pre-Snow Crash Stephenson risked tainting my opinion. Zodiac has action aplenty, accented by Stephenson's sarcastic wit. But it did pale in comparison to Snow Crash. To be fair, Zodiac, a 316-page novel, took me almost all May to read. I clearly couldn't give it my usual close attention. Even so, a couple of editorial gaffes — extra spaces, a misspelled name, and other such relatively minor typos — leapt off the page at me. This is what happens when you're polishing your own manuscript while trying to read for pleasure. I don't recommend it. It's why I read nothing else this spring. There was other demanding business in my life, which, combined with finishing my novel, demanded maximum focus.

The List: Reading July Through September 2015

Sarolta Bán

Among the reasons I like putting together these posts about my reading every three months is the revelation of unexpected patterns, digressions, and occasionally jarring contrasts that come to light when all the books I’ve been through are considered, one by one and as a motley whole. The timing of their subjects, too, is sometimes surprising.

In the wake of such major news items as the outing of the NAACP Spokane chapter’s president as white, the church massacre by racist creep Dylann Roof, and the much-belated lowering of the Confederate flag (we hope for good), my intention wasn’t to pick up two successive novels that meditate on American blackness — it just happened as a result of liking those authors’ previous work. And somehow it makes sense that I would progress from there to mysteries and science fiction (a stack of old Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Asimov’s issues finished out the month), genres that often challenge the reader with ideas only occasionally more outré than the concept of racism.

So: these “List” posts illustrate reading as Rorschach test. Reading as weathervane, too. Reading, also, as tarot, runes, bones.

My hearty thanks to Kristin S., Tom at Prospero’s, and Bridget S. this quarter, for sending me so many exceptional books. I can hardly wait to devour them all.

* * * * *

Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel
There’s too much here to neatly encapsulate. All of Lethem’s prodigious talents are brought to bear, and the story he’s set down swells with commensurate energy and scope. To call this a corning-of-age novel denies the complexity of its sociological perspectives. To say it’s about 1970s Brooklyn is to shrug off its sense of timeless intimacy. To zoom from its wide panorama to its addressing of racial identity or relations devalues its treasures. Although, to do any of the above would be technically accurate and therefore excusable. How do you write about a life? Obituary writers have their way, directed more by word count constraints than fidelity. Biographers have another, bound to a preconceived narrative arc. Lethem, with The Fortress of Solitude, gives us something altogether more vibrant, more meaningful, by way of Dylan Edbus and his friendship with Mingus Rude.

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist: A Novel
On the strength of Zone One, Whitehead’s insightful zombie novel of a few years ago, I insisted on reading this, his debut novel, set in what could be an alternate-history Manhattan of the 1960s. I wasn’t disappointed. Whitehead’s prose is alive and his plotting deft. The story of Lila Mae Watson, this nameless metropolis’s first black female elevator inspector, getting swept up in political conspiracy — a game piece fought over by multiple feuding factions — has all the briskness of a beach read. But its uncanny way with irony and subtlety belie the book’s status as literary fiction.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Edmund Wilson, editor), The Crack-Up
Before this, my familiarity with Fitzgerald was nil. The Great Gatsby, probably his most lauded work, might’ve been on the syllabus at my high school, but I left too soon to find out. Wide-ranging though my subsequent reading has been, it never included so much as his Benjamin Button. I’ve written here before about my tendency to approach from strange angles, not least (as is the hallmark of the autodidact) in matters of literature. Coming at Fitzgerald via his personal essays, letters, and unpublished notes, as they’re collected in The Crack-Up, often rough and rugged, is like ransacking the man’s bathroom — inspecting his medicine collection, checking his bathtub’s cleanliness, and itemizing the contents of his wastebasket. In other words, it may be the best way to get to know him.

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Yet another writing project led me to reread this. The first time was at least twenty years ago. A Study in Scarlet, for anyone who doesn’t know, marked the world’s first encounter with Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t make his acquaintance until I was eleven or twelve years old, almost 100 years later, when another fictional character introduced us. My favorite TV series at the time was Star Trek: The Next Generation, on which the android Starfleet officer, Data, spent occasional off-duty hours role-playing Holmes mysteries on the Enterprise D’s holodeck. Because I strongly identified with Data’s social misadventures, it stood to reason I’d appreciate Holmes’s exploits, too.

As it turned out, we had a lot in common. Holmes

• is an outsider;
• is often misunderstood by those around him;
• is passionate about his interests, to the point of being consumed, and ignores most everything outside their sphere, no matter how commonsensical or culturally relevant;
• is begrudgingly acknowledged by others for his talents, but gets little or no reward for his successes;
• lives a rich inner life;
• has keener-than-average senses; and
• plays the violin well, but only in private, for his own pleasure.

Because of how we met, it’s damn near impossible for me to think of the Sherlock Holmes adventures as anything but YA fiction. (Yes, even with the myriad obscure references and untranslated passages in French and Latin. And of course I’m only assuming there are no hidden allusions to Euripides and his Hippolytus in The Hunger Games. Correct me if I’m wrong.) It was kind of fun to revisit 221B Baker Street, though. They were some of the best research hours I’ve had in quite a while.

Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
How might time behave, and what might its nature be, in other worlds? While working in that Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein certainly gave this question lots of thought, and from that was birthed his theory of time. What Alan Lightman does here is imagine, in essence, Einstein’s dream journal — all of the ways time might work elsewhere, and what life would be like for the people in those other worlds. Lightman presents these flights of fancy with a lyricism and sensitivity not often seen from scientists (he’s not only a novelist but a theoretical physicist, and I found Einstein’s Dreams to be echoed by another physicist’s lovely work, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives). This book is a minor treasure, as a result.

Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer
His breathtaking novel-in-stories, The Illumination, told me everything I needed to know about Kevin Brockmeier: that he possesses a near-supernatural sense of his characters’ inner lives, which are usually glossed over by lesser writers; that he understands how, more than by almost anything else, we are shaped by our flaws and pains; that he is able to tell a story without being limited by any particular genre, which resonates as deeply as a bell gong struck in the pit of your stomach. I knew these things. Reading The View from the Seventh Layer just strengthened my conviction.

Thirteen stories, about aesthetic rebellion, the value of unfulfilled desire, the meaning(s) of life, identity versus external perception, and the precious mundanities of existence make up this collection. It’s forty-three, if you count every possible iteration of “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story.” To paraphrase Donald Bartheme, I loved each of them, strange objects that they are, covered in fur, which broke my heart.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
If anyone in contemporary sci-fi could pull off a multigenerational epic spanning 5,000 years, it’d be Stephenson. He’s been toying with such grand visions for years — from the spans involved in his present-day/World War Two-era Cryptonomicon (itself loosely connected to his Baroque Cycle novels), to the temporally cloistered monks of Anathem. Spanning centuries seems to come naturally to his restless mind.

Even the most rigorous completist is bound to overlook a detail or two while wrangling five millennia of culture, language, and technology into fewer than 900 pages. I found a few minor points to quibble with (one of which, early in the story, I actually tweeted him about). For all I know, though, some of these were deliberate liberties Stephenson took, in the interests of plot or readability. In any event, Seveneves made for good summer reading.

The List: Reading July Through September 2012

Somewhere in the world, probably in an apartment ceiling-high with Robotech models, Doctor Who paraphernalia, or worn Del Rey paperbacks, sits someone who would respond with a derisive snort — if the question were deemed worthy of a response at all — when asked if it’s possible to OD on SF. (For the uninitiated, “SF” is “speculative fiction,” which itself is the blanket term for written works of sci-fi, fantasy, alternate history, and all points in between.) We geeks believe we have our addictions under control. Overlooking for a moment that I’ve had actual Star Trek-induced goosebumps, that I’ve unironically decorated a Christmas tree with officially licensed TNG starship ornaments, and that I’ve taken under serious consideration my onetime fiancée’s suggestion of a Las Vegas Star Trek Experience wedding, I think I know when I’ve had enough.

Even while continuing to focus on genre novels, I can temper my intake with a soupçon of nonfictional and literary sustenance. Take my previous three months’ reading as proof.

* * * * *

Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Not an especially engrossing read, but a useful one if you’re in need of a refresher on near-future science. Kaku, one of the fathers of string theory and the host of many science-centric Discovery Networks programs, interviewed dozens of futurists and fellow scientists before writing this eminently reasonable prediction about the next century’s beginnings. The result is as wide-ranging as it is scattershot. Being a hodgepodge isn’t the book’s failing, though. A hit-and-miss outcome is to be expected when explaining to a lay readership everything from DNA manipulation to terraforming.

The sci-fi novel I can’t shut up about writing is set in the late twenty-second century. A lot of the predictions Physics of the Future makes are invaluable to my project, in that they gave me a strong source from which to extrapolate even further ahead. Kaku’s book is full of interesting facts, and it works well as a sampler for any troglodytic reader who’s not moved his rock to peek out at the world of science recently. It also seems hastily written, with lots of repetitious phrases, several typos, and (here I go again) repellent cover art. The publisher, Doubleday, ought to have provided a man of Kaku’s stature a better editor. A qualified graphic artist couldn’t have hurt, either.

If you’re after a glimpse at the discoveries and innovations that will change the world, you could do far worse than to pick up Physics of the Future — it’s like a World’s Fair in book form. For your own good, though, avoid its short final chapter, in which Kaku tries his hand at writing a science fictional slice-of-life "story" that’s supposed to work as an overview of the predicted future but really only makes you wish the future would get here so you could be finished reading this thing.

John Clute, Appleseed

For years before making this novelistic 2001 debut, John Clute was a literary critic, as well as co-editor of the Hugo Award-winning Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. His work elsewhere won him the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to fantasy and sci-fi scholarship. Or so I gather from this book’s dust jacket. I was away, for awhile, from what could be regarded as sci-fi’s galactic center — where all its heat and motion are — and hadn’t seen the name John Clute on anything until a few months ago, when Locus praised his more recent nonfiction book, Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (which sounded sufficiently excellent to add to my wish list). What’s this Clute guy all about? I wondered. So I picked up Appleseed.

At it’s core, Appleseed is standard space opera: lone interstellar pilot of a one-of-a-kind ship gets wind of a lucrative contract job and ends up out of his depth when said job pits him against a powerful enemy consortium that wants what he’s got (though pilot has no inkling what that is), and a universe is saved in process. Ho-hum, except not really. Some tales rest in the artistry of their telling. One maxim that keeps popping up in Appleseed says, “Sacred is the new.” Clute set this story thousands of years in the future, therefore the settings, the technologies, the languages, and even the physiologies of characters are so foreign and new that his reader can’t help being a little awed by the spectacle. Prose-wise, Clute’s posthuman tale is thoroughly postmodern, setting the linguistic bar high, which only adds to the pleasant disorientation, as in:

He was a figurine of porcelain in a maze of light, one whose corridors darkened into the fluted coral chambers of a spiral staircase, which was the inside of a cornucopia tiled with a story, and which grew larger the further he climbed, and made the sound of an ocean, and lo! he was peering through the crown of a great Tree, for he had in fact been climbing upside down. Here are the roots of the Tree (a voice said in his ear), once made of time, now made of weather. Help (scoffed the voice) if you can, little marmoset. What big eyes you have! Tell me (said the voice, diminishing into the cackle of a crone) a story.

At times I became frustrated with the free-associative poetics and pined for some straightforward storytelling to let me know what the hell was happening. But I suppose that writing about the quantum world of simultaneous states — things existing in one form and that form’s opposite at the same time, like Schrödinger’s poor dead/alive cat — is difficult without ambiguity. I excuse Appleseed’s occasional excesses. Simultaneously, I also don’t.

Joe Haldeman, A Separate War and Other Stories

Haldeman’s career in sci-fi started in 1969, when he sold his first piece of SF, “Out of Phase,” to Galaxy. Another SF story he wrote around the same time eventually became an episode of The Twilight Zone. His novel The Forever War was critically lauded as a sort of rebuttal to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Haldeman went on to win Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Awards, teach writing at MIT, and, after thirty-six years of publishing in the genre, release this fourth collection of stories. If I read anything of his, prior to July 2012, may I be forgiven for not remembering it.

The fact is, what little I’ve now explored of his work is as competent and thoroughly thought-through as it is unremarkable. But this is unfair of me. Certain stories in this collection — the title piece, the unrelated-but-similar “Finding My Shadow” and “Faces,” and all of his two- and three-page works — are quite good. The stories here that don’t work for me have language, a central idea, or some combination of both, that leaves me underwhelmed. Too, his repetitive tropes get tiresome: must everyone in the future be gay? Haldeman’s stories move at a good pace, for the most part, but rarely let me shake free of the acute awareness of reading a science fiction tale. I was rarely in danger of losing myself in his myriad universes. Perhaps his reputation promised too much.

David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (editors), Year’s Best SF 15

This is more like it. Twenty-four stories representing the editors’ choices of the finest short-form speculative fiction to appear in any magazine, webzine, or anthology in 2009. I can’t speak to the quality of the rest, but that year’s sci-fi seems well represented.

Only three stories strike me as not belonging here — two of them being engaging-enough alternate-history tales, one being just plain cheesy — but the other twenty-one are truly outstanding and worthy of the distinction “best.” I especially like the work here by women authors, whose characterization and focus on the interplay of relationships lends them greater sophistication: Vandana Singh’s superlative “Infinities,” Mary Robinette Kowal’s touching “The Consciousness Problem,” and Genevieve Valentine’s ingenious, understated “Bespoke.” It isn’t often that I’m led to an author by an anthology, but several of those appearing here went on my list for further reading. I’m most excited about the aforementioned Professor Singh and Ms. Valentine, and Alastair Reynolds, whose dreamlike meditation on entropy, “The Fixation,” was inspired by the same 2007 New Yorker article that prompted a story of my own (far inferior to Reynolds’s, I freely admit). I also added the other sixteen volumes of Year’s Best SF to my must-read list, the expansion rate of which must now rival that of the universe itself.

Roger W. Shuy, Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom

I’ll save you thirty-five dollars and 205 pages of fairly dry reading about a small, highly specialized field. What forensic linguists do is systematically analyze the language in recorded video and audio evidence, in criminal cases, then share their findings with juries (or at least advise the lawyers who hired them to study the recordings). It’s a nuanced process. This becomes evident when you consider that forensic linguists are called in when cases — indeed, people’s lives — hinge on whether parties’ definitions or understandings of a phrase, or even a single word, are the same. (Examples cited in Language Crimes show that two people having a conversation can have radically different definitions of promise, it, him, or even kill. Try to remember that, next time you speak ill of an ex-lover.) Shuy covers matters of bribing, perjuring, threatening, admitting, promising, testifying, and questioning — in the process laying bare some shocking and not-so-shocking misconceptions about how language is used.

Lawyers, judges, true-crime addicts, and the insatiably knowledge-starved may find Language Crimes a worthwhile read. Other than confirming that a forensic linguist’s help with my case would be beneficial in proving my innocence (and confirming my hard-won impression of America’s judicial system as a theater of pomposity, willful misunderstanding, and cynicism), this book didn’t do much for me.

Edwidge Danticat and Robert Atwan (editors), The Best American Essays 2011

The day I checked out this installment of the always-excellent Best American Essays series from the prison library, I was joined at “the nerd table” by one of my usual sexagenarian cohorts. (“The nerd table” being what we call wherever we sit together to thumb through the communal issues of Popular Science and Discover.) He spotted this book atop my stack, picked it up, and mused, “Well, well, well. What have we here — essays?”

A brief perusal followed. He read off titles. “‘Topic of Cancer,’ ‘Grieving,’ ‘What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?’ Wow, this is some morbid shit.”

Who was it who posited that it’s impossible to produce good literature about a happy man? In all fairness, though, this volume isn’t all metastasization, mourning, and murder — not by a long shot. Forget my acquaintance’s first impression; much of this book is transformative (Victor LaValle’s “Long Distance”), inspirational (Pico Iyer’s “Chapels”), edifying (Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?”), and just plain funny (Christy Vannoy’s “A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay”), and I recommend this one as confidently and heartily as I do any other year of the Best American Essays series.

Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

When I read Stephenson’s cyberpunk epic, Snow Crash, my typically understated reaction was a dry “Oh, yes, I like this.” Inside, though, I was giggling and swooning like a preteen girl in line at the gate of a Ricky Martin concert (it was 2000, so this reference is actually timely). That novel read like hackers and VR and mirrorshades, all packed up in a matte-black carbon-fiber attache case expressly for my delight. Stephenson became my hero the way William Gibson had, eight years prior.

The bad thing about reading such a phenomenal book is that everything its author writes will be in silent competition with what has gone before. The three Stephenson novels I’ve read in the last twelve years lacked Snow Crash’s kinetic verve, and one of them, The Diamond Age, I thought was downright disappointing. Some Remarks is a different sort of book, so perhaps I expected less — or at least different. If Snow Crash is a briefcase full of bleeding-edge tech, Some Remarks is a two-wheeled carry-on. Its contents include articles written for Slate, Salon.com, and Wired, plus a couple of vintage cyberpunk stories and much miscellanea. Including a 117-page trek through the fascinating world of undersea-cable laying, which I thought was totally awesome, this book fulfilled my nigh-boundless desire for intellectual exploration and just-right doses of smartassery.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

There was a time when I was a card-carrying member of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Society — secular libertarianism’s cult of personality. Like the good little acolyte I was, I read anything and everything I could concerning the Randian ideals of rational self-interest, laissez-faireism, and objective morality, beginning with Rand’s novels (Anthem, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and nonfiction (The Virtue of Selfishness, Return of the Primitive, The Romantic Manifesto), then branching off into tangentially related texts, from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason to Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Somehow, though, I never made it around to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress until now, a decade and a half after my Objectivist Society membership lapsed.

The 1997 Orb Books edition of The Moon declares itself “[Heinlein’s] classic, Hugo Award-winning novel of libertarian revolution,” but, besides some antiregulatory talk and a few barbs aimed at collectivist commies (it was written in 1966, after all), The Moon is more about freedom from tyranny and class exploitation than about anything Rand would have put her name to. First and foremost, the book is an adventure about a former Lunar penal colony’s revolt against Earthside controllers, which features plenty of fast-paced subterfuge, a little rioting, a smidgen of bawdiness, and only a dash of Heinlein’s notorious sexism. Sixteen years ago, I’d have been disappointed by The Moon’s lack of didacticism. Today I think it’s one of the best things Heinlein ever wrote.

Neal Stephenson, Reamde

It’s a brick. It’s a book. It’s both. Boo.