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“One woman’s airport bookstore,” Tipsy scowled, “is another woman’s beautifully paneled library.”
Windward Passage, Jim Nisbet

On the way back from Scotland, I was in need of some additional reading material, so I bought Alison Weir’s examination of the fall of Anne Boleyn. Melle commented later that I don’t really get the principle of airport book shopping.

What were you doing last night? Me? I was at a book reading/signing with Christopher Moore!

First, the venue was a church. And he spoke from the pulpit. And if that was delicious irony enough, he was mad with the quips about securing himself with the sash thingy in case of sudden rapture.

The reading wasn’t so much reading as some very funny stories about life on a book tour (the last time he spoke in a church, a young earnest man mistook his Ambien-induced brain fart for an epiphany), being Canada after a long time (though he finds the man being threatened by a boat full of monkeys on the back of our $20 to be a bit odd) and the awesomeness of his neuticals.

My BB camera sucks and it ran out of memory before I could get a picture with the man himself, but we got a great shot of Melle. And check this out:

The altar says "Do in remembrance of me" heh.

The absolute beauty of that. Really.

Just read The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. If you’ve ever wondered what the hell your high school/university teacher was talking about with the trochaic pentameter or enjambment, this delightful novel will answer that and also tell you a bit about poets and poetry.

Only it’s not a dry piece nor a pompous oration – the storytelling is great and the learning is (mostly) incidental. Plus there’s an awesome poke at the only recording we have of Tennyson reading his “Light Brigade” poem – I snorted.

Made me love poetry again and want to go read some, and that doesn’t happen every day.

Originally posted January 1, 2010

I’m not even gonna try to order these, and the selection process was excruciating, and ask me tomorrow and I may have a different answer, but here are some of the books that rocked my world published in the last 10 years. Some authors outdid themselves with several entries, so I put them together.

• Rush Home Road (2002) Lori Lansens. Honourable mention to The Girls (2005)
• The Dominion of Wyley McFadden (2001) Scott Gardiner. Honourable mention to King John of Canada (2007).
• Dead Girls (2003) Nancy Lee.
• American Gods (2001) Neil Gaiman.
• The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003) Audrey Niffenegger.
• The Road (2005) Cormac McCarthy.
• A Minor Planet For You: And Other Stories (2006) Leslie Greentree.
• The View From the Seventh Layer (2008) Kevin Brockmeier.
• Angel: After the Fall (2008-9) IDW Publishing.
• Alva and Irva (2004) Edward Carey.
• The Jen Casey Triology: Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired (2005) Elizabeth Bear.
• Resurrection Men (2004) Ian Rankin.
• Oryx and Crake (2004) Margaret Atwood.
• Under the Skin (2000) Michel Faber.
• The Thursday Next Series: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten and First Among Sequels (2001-07) Jasper Fforde.
• Magical Thinking: True Stories (2004), Possible Side Effects (2006), Running With Scissors: A Memoir (2002), Dry (2002) Augusten Burroughs.
• Fierce (2008) Hannah Holborn.
• Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (2000), Villa Incognito (2003) Tom Robbins.

===
Honourable Mentions

• My Abandonment (2008) Peter Rock.
• The Lovely Bones (2002) Alice Sebold.
• The World Without Us (2007) Alan Weisman.
• Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006) Heather O’Neill.
• Fight Club (2005) Chuck Palahniuk.
• Spook Country (2007) William Gibson.
• The Corrections (2001) Jonathan Franzen.
• Anathem (2008) Neal Stephenson.

I read a Robert Sawyer story that I like! It was a short story in an anthology called The Savage Humanists. The story, “Flashes”, is about what might happen if aliens started broadcasting the Encyclopedia Galatica to Earth, revealing answers to lots of things we asked, and correcting lots of facts and theories we thought we knew.  Oh, and random entries about symphonic music and how to build antimatter bombs…

Really good writing and a brilliant concept. Who knew.

I am a logophile. So, I was looking forward to reading Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language by Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman.

I like O’Connor’s approach (it’s her voice used in the book), since she knows her stuff but comes down firmly on the side of “the English language is changing and will always change, so we might as well get used it”, and she’s not afraid to tell sticklers to relax.

There were a lot of etymologies and word stories in this book that I already knew about (perhaps making me a word snob already, hmmm). In any case, there were a few items that I either chuckled at or realized that I had to revise my own misconceptions.

• Best street name (though it’s been renamed since): Gropecuntelane. If you guessed it was a red light district of sorts, you’d be right.
• The annoying quotation usage of the word “like” (as in She was like, I don’t know. And I was like, dude!) is a perfectly acceptable though recent development of the language that is here to stay.
• The more proper pronunciation of “comptroller” is “controller” (the first spelling being an introduction into the language as an illegitimate spelling in the 15th century. O’Connor prefers the “pure” pronunciation, but I think she contradicts her advice elsewhere in the book to keep things simple, so if it says “omp”, then you probably should pronounce it.
• “Female” has nothing to do with “male”. It’s etymology is from the Latin “femella”, whereas “male” comes from a different Latin root: “mascalus”. So no need to try to revise it as femyn or any other thing (except, I guess, “femella” if you want).
• “Grandfather clause” has racist origins. It got started as a Jim Crowe law in the south, a group of laws requiring poll taxes and literacy to be able to vote, with an exception being if your ancestors were able to vote before the Freedom Act, and this right to vote could be passed down to sons, grandsons, and so on. Great way for illiterate whites to be able to vote, but not so much the black people of the time.
• “Moot” means both “of no interest” and “debatable” or “worthy of discussion” (actually, the older meaning of the two).  Only one example of many where we allow a word to hold opposite meanings.
• One last one, and one where I disagree with the authors: “they” as a singular pronoun. As they note, “they” was used as “he” or “she” or a singular person as early as the 1300s (Chaucer, even), but then it was restricted to the plural use after that and for a long time. In a departure I don’t really understand, since she argues for a democracy of language most other times, O’Connor is left at the end not wanting to use the singular “they” and concluding that we need another word to get around the awkward “he or she”. “They” is perfectly suitable to my mind, and if it has a pedigree for that usage from old times, all the better.

The style of writing in the book is accessible, and I like that they give anecdotes about how word citations are found in obscure newspapers, popular culture, and so on.

If you like words, you’ll probably enjoy the read.

So, Cory. The talk I saw was “Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: the state of play in the global copyfight“. This is another love story, not with a subject, but with books.

Doctorow started his lecture with a homily to books. How we feel about them, how we want keep them and pass them on to our children. I was physically repulsed as he described a job he had at a bookstore when he had to remove the covers and destroy the innards of books that were being returned to the publisher (which was totally his point).

We are at the frontier of figuring out how to move forward in a world of electronic delivery of the arts – ebooks, digital media, and so on – can be accessed, downloaded and shared. But when you bring back the analogies of the “traditional” world of books and mixed tapes, then the absurdity of copyright law is revealed.

Doctorow also talked about “self help” copyright rules and the 3 Strikes premise, which essentially means that any ISP receiving an infringement notice, no matter how spurious, can and will cut off Internet access to the offending household, and you know that there are not many of us (except perhaps that guy living in a cabin in South Dakota, and even he needs access to the Anarchist’s Cookbook), who can make a living or have a life without the Interwebs.

Doctorow asks us to learn about the copyright law in our own countries and at the UN level (and he’s not so happy with the UN), and to participate in discussions as the law is being created.

For, as his informal poll pointed out, none of us are innocent within the system as it is being developed.

During the questions, there was one interesting one referring back to the session I saw with Neal Stephenson and Jaron Lanier – where Jaron had been talking about what he thinks is a more equitable system of delivery. Essentially, we all pay a few cents per use of whatever commodity we want to use — including art, writing, music… Doctorow’s response is that he thinks this is not tenable. He says that experimentation has shown that the cost of us having to decide whether or not this content is worth “5 cents” is  greater than the 5 cents, and so we won’t participate.

Unfortunately, the other questioner was an older “volunteer” with the festival who hijacked the time with simplistic questions (and she asked TWO, which is a no-no). Apparently she did the same at the later session, and I’d strongly recommend that someone explain to her why this is annoying.

I think for this kind of topic, each of us has to think it through and I at least agree that we should participate where we can in the discussion. I do believe that the ability to block someone from the Internet is a very harsh sentence, and needs to be used with care, and I don’t have trust that it will be, since the primary players are lawyers and ISPs.

Now I’m off to fondle my books.

But what publishers of books and music are trying to do, argues Doctorow, is develop a world where, at any time, and with no forewarning, they can reach into your home and essentially “take back” the books that you already purchased. That all that small print in the copyright (sometimes bigger than the ebook they are trying to sell) is basically you signing off on their right to do so.

Banner day in K-W: Margaret Atwood was here to promote her new book and kick off Word on the Street, and Cory Doctorow was here being Cory.

The KPL was quite a flurry of activity for Ms Atwood. Her trademark wit came through, and her dry (arid) delivery certainly added to the merriment. Apparently, Kitchener will forever be in her heart associated with spinach salad, since this was the first place that she ever tasted one (long before it was de rigueur, or so she told us).

The reading was interesting. The first passage she read described Toby’s apartment over the meat processing shop and subsequent foray into furries. The second passage was about Ren’s early life with Lucerne and Zeb in the God’s Gardeners quarters. The third was a bit of a sermon from Adam One (Mole Day, a very auspicious day indeed). And then she must have been feeling a little feisty or something, because she actually sang the Mole Day hymn for us.

Atwood was funny and very warm and just this side of absent-minded professor in her embracing of the tweets of twitter. Though with a rapier in her gown (burnished with velvet) for the “host/interviewer” they dragged out from a local tv station who shall remain nameless because that’s how bad he was.

He started off with a fair lob, I suppose – i.e. why is future fiction “so negative” (I’m not sure “dystopia” was within his reach). Atwood gave a little history lesson in both utopic and dystopic world views, touching on 1895, the first half of the 20th century and so on.

So when he asked her what she thought 18th Century people would think about us, she cut him to the quick (we are assuming he thought 1895 was in the 18th Century). Very entertaining for those of us in the room who were not him. And, of course, the only good random answer would be “They wouldn’t much like our clothing.”

After a valiant attempt by him to get in the game, and some more <gentle> mockery from her, he was more than happy to move on to the Q&A.

Can’t say the questions were all that inspired, but Atwood did her best to turn each one into the kernel of an interesting observation or anecdote. Then just like that, it was time for book signings.

Kindly, Melle and Melissa stuck around with me while I waited. Dana and Ashley were a ways ahead of us, so we made them wait too. Though lots of people were getting pictures and such, I was content to tell her it was a pleasure and then move on.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go listen to Cory …yet, but Melle did. AND, of course, I will see him in a few weeks at Perimeter’s q2c Festival.

JEALOUS MUCH?

Finally got around to reading Howard Burton’s First Principles: The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science.

Primary value of which was hearing about the founding of PI (though through a very thick filter of ego), and confirming my previous characterization of the author, as referenced in the title of this post. ‘Nuff said.

It’s a truism that science fiction embeds many a kernal of truth, or the possible (if not the probable). A good science fiction writer sees what is now (or was) and takes it to some logical end to see what happens. Sometimes, the results are pure delight: a la Jasper Fforde, and sometimes the results are terrible: The Road comes to mind.

In the latter category is Mars Life by Ben Bova. Intelligent life has been confirmed on Mars from about 60 million years ago, when it was wiped out, presumably by an asteroid event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth. There are about 200 scientists on Mars carrying out excavations and experiments, and a village is discovered at the bottom of the canyon.

Due to global warming and the decimation of resources, arid areas have become floodplains, the prairies have become desert, and much of the coastline has been lost to much higher water levels. It’s hell on Earth, and sufficient monetary pressure on governments and big business to either donate or make money off the backs of refugees.

Meanwhile, in an increasingly fundamentalist USA, funding for the Mars program is cut and leaders from the religious right are seeking to stop the program entirely, since the concept of intelligent life on another planet clashes with their view of God – i.e. he made humans, to rule the EARTH. This is also a culture in which Darwin has been entirely suppressed, and only creationism is taught in schools.

The battle is to try to sustain the research on Mars with what would be the most important scientific discovery ever, in the face of persecution, lost funds and pressure to open up the planet to tourists.

I found myself alternately swearing and shaking my head in either rebuttal or disbelief, with a palpable sense of discomfort at just how possible this scenario is. As Bova notes in the interview linked above,

I consider religious fundamentalism to be the most serious threat to democracy and individual liberty that this nation has ever faced. Religious intolerance has destroyed great empires in the past. It could destroy the United States of America in the foreseeable future.

Of course, it’s not just the US, but they do seem to have an inordinate number of powerful and wealthy fundamentalists. Even Obama is not immune from their influence, and tactics such as boycotts or blocked advertising aren’t science fiction at all–they are in use today.

It’s very hard to step outside of the facts to try to understand how these people see the world through a little arrow slit of thought and fear and prejudice (so wonderfully detailed by Mark Morford on a regular basis). It’s a mean little world view. An aggressive view. A dangerous view to science, to nature and to tolerance. Scares me more than any monster that a fiction writer might come up with.

Bova does try to show perhaps some alternative, more progressive “spiritual” paths–namely Native myths (Navahoe), and even the Catholic church to some extent. The book itself is in some way an affirmation of a spiritual interpretation to anything that we might discover out there (i.e. God’s work wherever we may find it in the universe).

While that interpretation is unecessary, it’s certainly better than the fundamentalist alternative.

Books that make me think = good stuff.