Books

Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia:

"The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

"The meeting of author and reader has a similar soul-shaping potential. The author who can make a world for a reader–make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings–that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? If we weight the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list."

Michael Dirda wrings his hands over being underwhelmed by Neil Stephenson’s latest:

Alas, I can’t even lope slowly alongside the herd. Oh, Anathem will certainly be admired for its intelligence, ambition, control and ingenuity. But loved? Enjoyed? The book reminds me of Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul from 17 years ago — much anticipated, in places quite brilliant, but ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull.

…

Alas, there’s worse. I also find the book to be fundamentally unoriginal. If you’ve read Russell Hoban’s brilliant Riddley Walker, you’ve seen punning word coinages done better and more poetically. If you’ve read Walter M. Miller Jr.’s sf classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, you know that monasteries are havens of civilization and science (in Anathem‘s case, of high-level mathematics and theoretical physics). Most of all, if you’ve read Gene Wolfe’s four-part Book of the New Sun, you can appreciate how this kind of grand encyclopedic vision, with mysteries at its core, can be brought off with far more elegance, wit and artistry. All these, by the way, are masterpieces — and not just of "their genre."

Wowza. Anyone read it yet? Is he right?

Updated: And a very different take from Martin Lewis at Strange Horizons today:

There has always been a strong pedagogic element to Stephenson’s work; not for nothing is The Diamond Age subtitled A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. This book takes it to new levels. Here we have not just his infamous digressions—fascinating as always—but a narrative that is predominantly told in formal and semi-formal dialogue after the model of the ancient Greeks. Even after the novel is finished, even after the glossary, we are presented with three "calca," lessons in mathematics and philosophy for the reader that are only tangentially related to the story. All this, coupled with the boarding school atmosphere of the Concent, the adolescent voice of the protagonist, and the birds and bees approach to relationships, gives Anathem something of the air of a Young Adult novel. In fact, with its longeurs and constant debate, it occasionally resembles an unholy hybrid of The Republic and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and it can be every bit as tediously wearing as that sounds. As Stephenson signals from the outset, nothing is left unexplained.

Anathem may be a bildungsroman with teenage overtones but Stephenson’s sights are clearly set beyond the YA market. He gives the impression of a Geek Philosopher King who has set out to write a fictional version of one of those massive, iconic works of popular non-fiction such as Guns, Germs and Steel or Gödel, Escher, Bach and he has done an astonishingly good job of realising this ambition. The novel does have a tendency to get bogged down in detail and there are intermittent bouts of tone deafness on Stephenson’s part—both isues also present in his earlier work—but this doesn’t detract from the impact of his achievement. Since Anathem writes its own rulebook to be judged by, it has succeeded in making itself almost entirely critic-proof anyway.

See the comments section as well. I’m now back to looking forward to it.

1. The Farewell Issue of The Journal of Mythic Arts from Endicott Studio goddesses Terri Windling and Midori Snyder. There is tons of good stuff to be read, as always, and it’s nice to get to revel in its fabulousness one last time.
2. Researcher, writer and rare books expert Lisa Gold has a new blog about research and other matters. You could say she’s a smartypants, but that’s an understatement. Here’s a listing of some projects she’s worked on, including The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. She’s also married to Matt Ruff, most excellent writer and baker of brownies.

Because I do, and so I had to laugh when I noticed that the rave review in the New York Times’ for E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (one of my favorite novels of the year) included the following paragraph:

Frankie has style. Panache. In the summer since her freshman year, she has grown into her "angular face, filled out her figure and transformed from a homely child into a loaded potato — all while sitting quietly in a suburban hammock, reading the short stories of Dorothy Parker and drinking lemonade." Even to her family, "she was Bunny Rabbit. Innocent. In need of protection. Inconsequential."

The "loaded potato" being a term a bunch of YA types had decided to use in their novels at the 2006 NCTE conference. Cecil‘s perhaps the loaded potato standard bearer, with uses in both The PLAIN Janes and Janes in Love, and as the originator of a similar challenge that served as an inspiration for this one (see next link for details). Now she’s asking those who participated to come clean. Look out for flying (loaded) potatoes.

In compiling the hangovers for today, I realized I’ve accumulated enough Breaking Dawn-related links to make their own post.

I was highly amused by Leila’s live blogging her reading experience ("47 – Of COURSE it’s Pachelbel’s Canon") and Jen Fu’s entry "live texting Breaking Dawn: a Novel of Vampire Doing-It" ("PAGE 360 OH MY GOD THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN").

The wonderful and insightful Liz Hand’s review in the Washington Post is the real piece de resistance though. She read all four books and spots some troubling subtext:

Yet there’s something distinctly queasy about the male-female dynamic that emerges over the series’ 2,446 pages. Edward has been frozen at the age of 17. But he was born in 1901, and he doesn’t behave anything like a real teenager. He talks and acts like an obsessively controlling adult male. He sounds far more like a father than a boyfriend, and Bella’s real father remains a detached if benign figure. Bella consistently describes herself as stupid, accident-prone, unworthy of her beloved’s affection.

…snipped for length…

This bland passivity has been excused as a way of allowing female readers to project themselves into Bella’s place, but the overall effect is a weird infantilization that has repellent overtones to an adult reader and hardly seems like an admirable model to foist upon our daughters (or sons).

More from Liz here. Matt Ruff uses the review as a jumping off point to talk about the fact there’s an element of this in every romance involving a young person and a centuries-old vampire and recommends a British miniseries called Ultraviolet that sounds really interesting.

And for the even more controversially inclined, there’s the ongoing conversation about race in the series. I suspect this post at Dear Author pretty much nails that one.

Our local paper has a great story today about a rural Kentucky high school book club called the "Moo Moo Club" because they wear muumuus when they meet in honor of a photograph of their favorite teacher wearing one. A couple of excerpts, because this story makes me very happy:

By February, 53 students showed up for the club meeting, and it had to be moved to the school auditorium. The students, even some of the boys, wore nightgowns, housecoats and robes.

"It looked like a pajama party," says Mullins.

One student wore a real muumuu.

"I got one from my grandmother," says Olivia Skeens. "Actually, she still wears muumuus."

And, more importantly, they’re reading some good books too, for instance:

The most popular book read by the Moo Moo Club has been Lessons From a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles.

"The kids raved about it, and the first Friday night after it was assigned, the students were texting each other, saying they couldn’t put it down," Mullins says.

The book proved so ­popular that students who were not in Mullins’ classes or the club began checking it out of the library, and Mullins was able to arrange a conference call between her students and the author.

Go, Jo!

Welcome to all you guys visiting after hearing the NPR story about Anne of Green Gables. Recent posts of at least semi-substance include one about Shirley Jackson’s domestic writing in honor of another hundredth anniversary and some thoughts related to class in YA and middle grade fiction. And, of course, there’s the post about one of the dogs investigating a turtle, because this is a blog and thus cute animal pictures are a requirement.

You’ll also find some book recommendations over in the sidebar to the right, but I thought I’d make one specifically related to Anne. Laura Amy Schlitz is a children’s literature superstar now, after winning the Newbery, but I still don’t hear enough people talking about her first bookchildren’s novel, which came out in 2006. A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama is a mash-up of many things, and Anne is among them.

The story finds Maud*, a resident at the Barbary Asylum for Female Orphans, having the misfortune of being adopted by spiritualists who want to use her in their cons. Maud is a character very much in conversation with Anne Shirley, and I think the opening paragraph will be enough to convince you:

On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

*L.M. Montgomery reference, maybe? I prefer to think so, even if it isn’t.