Tag: booklists

- Stacy

I’m back from my trip to New York City. It was really nice to see everyone, and those of you I missed, I’m sure I’ll catch you on the next trip, which I’ll take more time to plan. 🙂 I also made it to The Strand for the first time, and wow! I think I want to live there. Just set up my little leather chair and ottoman and read to my heart’s content. I took some pictures with my cell phone, but I need to find my microdisc adapter before I can post them. It’s just a 2 megapixel little cell phone, not my regular nice camera, so the clarity isn’t so hot, but it was fun to memorialize a little of my trip.

There are some things in the works which I’m not ready to talk about on the blog yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to post about them soon when I get all the information together.

In the meantime, I was thinking about all the reading that I’ve done recently, and it occurred to me that this is the perfect place to talk to bookish people about all those good books.

So: what have I read lately?

Alcatraz vs. the Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson. Disclaimer: Brandon is a friend of mine from college. But who cares? Whether I know him or not, the book is funny–even funnier than the first book, Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians (well, disclaimer on that too: I read book 1 in draft form, so I bet book 1 in print is even funnier).

I got started on Bad Kitty by Michelle Jaffe (the YA novel, not the picture book) before the flood happened, and I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet. So that goes back in the TBR list (i.e., books I want to read but don’t have physical copies for for the TBR pile). As far as I read, I was enjoying the snarky teen girl voice.

The Luxe by Anna Godberson. I had expectations going into the paperback version–because I think I had read spoiler at some point–that were conf
irmed by the end, but despite my expectations being confirmed I loved the way this story was told. One thing I did not expect was five different viewpoints, but it was really amazing how it all fit together so well, despite the different characters’ vastly different agendas. We in publishing can often make generalizations about the number of viewpoints a book should have; this book is a great example of the exception to he rule. If you’re thinking about doing more than one viewpoint in a book you’re currently working on, The Luxe is one to look at as a craft example. I’ve been told that its sequel, Rumors, is even better, so that goes in the TBR list.

Currently reading

Lamplighter by D.M. Cornish. The sequel to Monster Blood Tattoo (or Foundling, as it’s now called, and now the series name is Monster Blood Tattoo), which I heard on audio. Highly recommend that listening experience–I loved the narrator. I’m not very far into Lamplighter yet so I can’t really comment on it–yet!

Skinned by Robin Wasserman. Seems like science fiction for teens is taking a turn from the dystopian, which I’m really glad to see. There’s so much more to science fiction than that one subgenre. So far so good–the main character Lia Kahn is in an accident that nearly kills her and her consciousness is downloaded into a new body. It’s almost a zombie meets an android, I suppose–it almost fits in with books like Zombie Blondes and Generation Dead, but not quite–so if you have readers who liked those books this might be one of those "if you liked _________ then you might enjoy ________" recommendations (depending on the reader, of course). It looks like it’s going to tackle some interesting subjects while Lia deals with being dead, but not dead.

On the TBR pile/list (not comprehensive! 🙂 and amazingly enough, they’re not all YA)

Manolito Four-Eyes by Elvira Lindo
How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justina Larbalestier
The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner
My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie by David Lubar (this looks HILARIOUS)–ARC for the book coming out Aug. 2009, so no link yet
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (a YA branch-off in the world of Old Man’s War)
Veil of Lies: A Medieval Noir by Jeri Westerson
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (which I’ve been meaning to read for a couple years, and wanted to read before the election)
Lord Loss by Darren Shan
Skin Hunger by Kathleen Duey
The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett (this is an ARC–the book doesn’t come out until March of 2009)
Minders of Make-Believe by Leonard S. Marcus (another one that I started before the flood but hadn’t gotten through before all the craziness began. I fou
nd it at The Strand for $13! I heart The Strand!)
The Good Neighbors–Book One: Kin by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci (which also looks hilarious–stories about geeky life). Also, another ARC for a book coming out Aug. 2009, so no link yet.
Sovay by Celia Rees. This looks awesome, but I haven’t started it yet. It’s about a rich teen girl in the late 1700s who becomes a highway robber. If you’ve read Witch Child, it’s the same author. I LOVED Witch Child, though its sequel, Sorceress, wasn’t as strong. I haven’t had a chance to read Pirates! but I’ve heard good things about it.
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin. I’ve been meaning to read Grace Lin’s books for a while, so I’m excited to get a chance to read the ARC of her new book, which comes out next year.
Meg Cabot’s 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU series.

Oh, and another reason I love The Strand? Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? for $10.50. Not even Amazon has that price. I had this book as a kid but I can’t find my copy of it. I also had the fairy tale book–little kitty as Little Red Riding Hood? It was awesome! I didn’t go looking for it, though. Too much temptation, if I found the Richard Scarry section. I
didn’t go with a lot of extra money in my pocket. But oh, the temptation! I think this is an updated version of a book my brother and sister and I had as kids. My brother had Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. I think one of these days I need to get them all and do an homage post to Richard Scarry.

Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature

- Stacy

Oh, and while I was rambling I completely forgot I also wanted to mention that I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande. I read from the ARC some, then listened to most of it on CD way back last month, but was finally able to finish it today, and I have to say–hurrah! Great job. Brande does a really great job at explaining the point of view of the many, many people of faith who also believe that science is learning things that perhaps God had a hand in, but also that science and especially the teaching of science in public schools don’t make a claim as to exactly how that fits into a particular belief system.

I loved going to BYU, actually, because it supported my belief in both. My geology class at BYU was an amazing experience, even if it was the only class I’ve ever flunked. Okay, that was more because it was an 8am class and oh, you DO NOT turn out the lights and show slides for an 8 AM class! I never knew half what was going on, and more’s the pity because what I did hear was amazing, and for that very reason I wanted to believe that I could stay awake and didn’t drop it. And what I did learn (among other things, I promise) was how geology fit into the personal worldview of my teacher as a practicing Mormon–something you can have a conversation about at a private religious college, of course. It was fascinating, and what I got most out of it is that there’s still a lot of the miraculous in science, and if we believe (meaning all people of faith who believe in A god) that God created the world, then perhaps the things we learn about in evolution can teach us about the possible means by which he (or if you so believe, she) did it.

Anyway, if that even made sense at this hour, there’s an excellent interview at the end that Robin Brande does with … a scientist much like the teacher character she creates in the book, whose name has escaped me, and it’s really pithy stuff. He was the author of Finding Darwin’s God, a book that explored Darwin’s belief system, and now that’s on my want-to-read pile.

Highly recommend Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature. Realism, teen girl angsty, but bringing religion in as a way of bringing the character’s inner life to life. And it’s just dang funny. I really liked how it portrayed this girl’s religious life positively, even while exploring the cattiness of a high school clique, without condemning the clique for being religious (rather, for being hypocritical and… the word escapes me. I got nothin’. I give up for the night).

Good night. Next time I recommend a book, I promise to do it while fully awake. I just didn’t want to forget about this!

FAQ: Take Joy, a review (sort of)

- Stacy

I think it appropriate that the book I will review today will be Jane  Yolen’s Take Joy, due to all the joy I’ve been taking in my new camera over the weekend. I’ve been finding the joy again in my photography that I’ve been delaying for so long because film has become such an encumbrance that I end up saving rolls of film for months–my latest batch included shots from San Diego Comic-Con last July, a trip I took last August, several rolls from my Christmas travels, as well as a variety of smaller events in the last six months–and by the time I get to see them again, the pictures have little meaning. I didn’t play with pictures as much as I used to when in photography classes because I don’t have the time to play in the darkroom making the exposure perfect (though how tempting it has been over the years to find a place I can build a darkroom, especially this last year because my uncle offered me his enlarger….).

Getting the digital camera, even in the first few days of use, has given me back that joy. I’m starting to remember the way I used to play with angles and ligh
ting and the strange subjects I used to seek out. I have done a little of that playing with my camera phone, but that’s more of a toy than a passion–when you’re dealing with a 2 MP camera, there’s only so much art you can create.

(I have a point, really I do.)

This is an important process to me, because I occasionally do a freelance article here and there, a wedding here and there, that kind of thing. I’m taking some pictures for our kickboxing teacher in a couple weeks to help him promote his new dojo. But I’d been feeling lately that I was losinig my chops. All my pictures ended up coming out the same–lots of flash burn, standard compositions, nothing out of the ordinary that gives you that wow factor. Competent, but not excellent. Even the pictures I posted in the last few days reflect those ways of seeing, though I love the salt shaker post because it’s something different, something new I tried after learning a few things about indoor lighting (the bane of my photographic existence).

So, what does this have to do with writing and with Jane Yolen’s book in particular?

The whole book is about that discovery process, giving writers permission to find that joy that I have been rediscovering in my photography. In the first chapter Yolen quotes Gene Fowler, “‘Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead'” and immediately refutes him: “I suggest you learn to write not with blood and fear, but with joy.” She says to forget about publishing, because it’s out of your hands, and to focus on the joy of your craft–of writing a story well, of really digging in and living in the story.

A very good premise. I mean, after all, why write if you don’t find joy in it? I write. I think I’ve said it before here. I have a story, a retelling of a Scottish fairy tale, that I’ve been working on since my last year at BYU, in 2001. It’s gone through many renditions, and the most I’ve ever finished was a novellette for a folklore class in grad school. Then I threw out the entire setting and decided to change it all around, and have gotten all of 10,000 words written since then in the new setting.

Why haven’t I finished it? Because while it brings me joy to live in that story, it doesn’t bring me enough joy to make it worth my time to write every night after doing a very similar activity at work every day. I fully admit I may never be a published fiction writer (I am a published non-fiction freelance writer over and over, but that’s a different market), and that’s enough for me to find the little joys in the little bits of writing I do from time to time because publication isn’t important to me–what’s important to me is the story in my imagination.

And mostly because I find that same kind of joy in being an editor to far better books than I could probably write right now.

For those who don’t have that push-pull of using up that creative energy before you can set pen to paper (metaphorically speaking), Yolen’s book will have much fodder for the imagination.

Though I must say that the whole numinous “the mystery of fiction,” “the mystery of the writing process,” bleh. Don’t make it all mysterious, as if someone with a little talent and a lot of effort can’t figure it out. There’s nothing mysterious about the combination of putting in the time to do something you love so that you can develop the inborn talent you have into something better. It’s work, but if you find joy in it, it’s time well spent, in my opinion.

But that may just be my practical Midwestern upbringing coming into play. Doesn’t mean that there isn’t mystery in the art, and if that motivates you to seek joy in creating art, whatever your art is, more power to you.

Back to Take Joy–as you have probably already guessed, this isn’t so much a review as a disjointed essay borne from a few ideas I’ve plucked from its pages–Yolen says
that “These stories grace our actual lives with their fictional realities. Like angels they lift us above the hurrying world.” I really like that idea. I don’t know if I can recapture what it is that caught me about that particular passage, but I’ll try.

As I was driving home the other night a program on NPR caught my attention. It was a Romanian professor by the name of Kodrescu (spelling? who knows?) who was speaking about the power of memories, how we create memories that didn’t actually happen and turn them to pedagogical uses, how we change memory to fantasy because sometimes fantasy feels more real than the reality it is trying to reflect.

How to express this? That talk really said something to me the other night, but now it’s slipping from my mind, and I can barely even remember who the speaker was at this point.

At any rate, I think what I’m trying to say is that sometimes in fiction we find more truth than we do in the reality we’re seeking to interpret. I’ve said this before about fantasy, about its wonderful metaphorical magic. We can talk about struggles, the epic battle between good and evil, the shades of gray, the variety of human existence, in so many ways in fantasy that we can’t do as well in realism sometimes because of the power the metaphor gives us–the power that the fictional, the fantasy (meaning the numinous, the fantastic, as well as simply the fantasy of making up a story), give us to assign multiple meanings and to interpret and reinterpret.

That the stories can “grace our actual lives with their fictional realities” can mean so many things, and I’m losing the ability to express what I’m trying to say.

At any rate, the book is a good read, and I think nonwriters as well as writers can benefit from the idea of taking joy in the art you pursue–remembering why you do what you do.

Of course, writers will get even more out of it, because she’s got some solid advice for writers in there about taking rejection well, the elements of a good story (beyond a simple anecdote to a fully drawn drama), finding your voice, even a whole section dedicated to specific practical advice. I love the little interludes, the little bits of wisdom between chapters. One such, before chapter 5, is especially apropos for anyone who writes historical fiction, fantasy, or other genres that require lots of research:

For a writer, nothing is lost. Research once done can be used again and again, a kind of marvel of recycling. As writers we need to be shameless about thieving from ourselves.

For example, I did two books on the Shakers–a nonfiction book called Simple Gifts and a novel, %3
Cem>The Gift of Sarah Barker. And it is no coincidence that the round barn I discovered in my historical research, I then used as a piece of setting in the Sarah Barker book. It later found its way into my young adult science fiction novel, Dragon’s Blood.

Good research swims upstream where it can spawn. (p. 41)

So there you have it, as one of hopefully a lot of writing book recommendations here at Stacy Whitman’s Grimoire, couched in an essay on finding my photography chops again. Check out the book–you might find some gems that help you find joy in your own writing.