Summer is always busy in my family, which is to be expected when your parents are both teachers. They always want to drag their kids across the country to see long lost relatives, or just hang out on the beach, and god knows both pastimes were always met with approval by myself and my brother. (Particularly since our family is a trip, on both sides, and blessedly fun to be with. Seems like a rare thing, but hey, I’m a lucky girl.) Even now that I live six hours away from them and my brother has just graduated with his BA, we’re still caught up in the whirlpool now and then, leading to months like this past one.
Which has been great, but insane. Kind of sums up my family in general, though.
Due to the madness, I’ve been a little too distractible to deal with reading full-length novels. Between long car rides and visiting, short stories have been more my deal-appropriate since I’ve just finished the draft of the Audio File project, and am trying to let it cool by concentrating on writing shorts for the next few weeks. So it works out.
I finally got hold of Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, which was of course wonderful. It’s a bit like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without the profuse and distracting sidebars, really-bite size chunks of her fabulous world. I was extra happy to see Strange again, since he’s one of my favorite literary characters these days (along with, of course, Arabella), in the title story. It’s wonderful to visit Neil Gaiman’s Village of Wall again in The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse as well. But the “favorite” slot in this one is definitely reserved for Mr. Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower-which is the kind of thing I most like to read. A little dark, a lot of magic, and weirdly whimsical at the same time. She’s fabulous. It’s like Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen had an evil lovechild.
Er. Something to that effect, anyhow.
I really like the concept of redesigning the larger myth of a country into something codified. I know that’s what Tolkien was trying to do, create this entire mythos, and I know Clarke is after it as well. I really wonder what it would look like if someone managed it for America.
You know, apart from American Gods. Which is really as close as we can come, in some ways-but also more like the seminal book in a future/current country-wide attempt. The beginning of something brilliant, and all that.
To switch gears, I also got my copy of Barren Worlds, a Science Fiction anthology from Hadley Rille books. An old writing pal, Sue Penkivech, has a great story in it, so naturally I wanted to see the whole thing in all its radiant printed glory. When it comes to Sci-Fi, I love Herbert, Asimov, and a couple of other classics, and I’m a sucker for the genre in film, comics, and television, but I don’t usually get into reading it in novel form. Short stories, however, I will swallow in one delicious gulp.
Lots of good stuff in this anthology-a really wide spectrum of takes on the rather vague yet inspiring theme. Most of them leave you feeling kind of deflated and/or disturbed, but in that good and thoughtful way. (Maybe that’s why I can’t handle reading too much sci-fi at once-it always makes me thoughtful and I’m kind of a shallow dick? Short stories are the best!) But some of them are hopeful and weirdly uplifting. I’m getting a kick out of the varied emotions with which I come out of each story, and I’m super impressed with the way the editors purposefully chose and ordered them to get that effect. Difficult in any anthology, let alone one with so much material. Well done on all counts.
So of course, after all this I needed to go back to Vonnegut-who is pretty much Home Base for me when it comes to modern Science Fiction. When I was about 15, I had a teacher, Mrs. Paugh, who tried to talk me into reading Sci-Fi more seriously. She gave me this book of short stories she’d had in one of her college courses called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Of course, I had no idea who Vonnegut was at that age, we hadn’t gotten to Slaughterhouse Five, and I don’t think I would’ve absorbed it if we had. But the title story was, of course, his, and a lot of the others struck such a chord with me that I decided that Sci-Fi was definitely worth a go-at least in short form. (My brother won me over to the novel form with Dune about a year later.) Years later in college I had a bunch of friends who were all about the Vonnegut and went back to him, and realized that he is pretty much love.
Reading the Barren Worlds anthology made me dig out the short story collection of his I got a few years ago called Welcome to the Monkey House. If you want a serious recommendation for awesome short fiction, that’s my first. The man could do everything, and make it his. The surreal war-is-hell vibe he’s so famous for in All the King’s Horses, with its super tense human chess theme, and The Manned Missiles, Cold War emotion and release in letter format. His painfully truthful take on modern literary fiction in Miss Temptation and The Lie. That brilliant humor I love him for-cold and nonjudgmental, yet somehow almost accidentally sympathetic-talking about the delusional housewife in More Stately Mansions. And the perfect Sci Fi dystopian visions of Welcome to the Monkey House and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. And when I say perfect, I really mean it. Those are only just my favorites, but the whole collection is, and I do not say this lightly, totally rad.
This is fun stuff. This is what reading should be all about: having a good time and maybe saying something honest now and then. Tracks and connections that get you to here and there.
All that said, it’s nice to be able to sit down and read a full length novel again, now that I’m home and settled for a bit.
That and, of course, sit down and write something. Before I start twitching.
-Katey
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