Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology

Buy on Amazon!

This is a book to benefit the Save the Children foundation for tsunami relief -- a very interesting anthology of science fiction and fantasy, and for a good cause (although I checked it out from the library).

To remember the favorites:
"Report from the Near Future: Crystallization" - this was a pretty scary account of a humongous traffic snarl in LA that would clog up the entire region. Triggered by just a few seemingly small events. Seems like a little too close to reality for comfort, but very well done.

"Tough Love: 3001" by Juliet Marillier
The author had just run a writing critique group where she learned that "no amount of literary technique is going to make a person a good writer."
This story was very entertaining because the participants in the group were all aliens who chose pseudonyms of famous writers, and the one who decided to call himself Gaiman was the coolest.
and "Sea Air" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, about a boy who realizes he's meant to be of a different race entirely - even though he's always been afraid of the ocean, he eventually rejoins his family in the sea. (this is like several other stories I vaguely remember. It seems very Lovecraft).

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

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I love Anne Tyler. When I was reading this it was during a time when I was thinking about a supergroup salon of wise women - Anne Tyler, Nora Ephron, my therapist, and PM of course.
I always forget how much I like Anne Tyler's work - I don't think about it that much, but when I see a new book I always pick it up and I'm surprised and pleased.

This book opens with what seems to be a purely coincidental event - two families congregating at the Baltimore airport to welcome Korean orphans that they are adopting.
This chance meeting of these families at this pivotal point in their lives becomes an event they mark every year, highlighting their cultural differences and characters as Tyler moves around in perspective throughout the book. We're in Maryam's world (the matriarch of the Iranian-American side) for most of the book, but it was so cool to have a book starting with one of the characters as an infant (Jin-Ho, arriving from Korea) and then later in the book we get a couple chapters from her POV as a young child. What do all these well-drawn family members look like, to this newest addition to the family?

Liz Hickok - San Francisco in Jello

We are now the proud caretakers of this print - from Liz Hickok's series where she creates San Francisco out of Jello and photographs the results!

All thanks to Leo and his "Take care of my stuff, I am going to Japan!" party, and to Birk, who noticed the picture on the wall going up the stairs and commented that it was Jello!

I had heard of Liz Hickok already and am fascinated by her work, but I had just been too focused on getting up and down the stairs without falling to look to the side and notice the pictures.

Pedro and Me by Judd Winick

Buy on Amazon!


This is a very moving graphic novel by Judd Winick, Pedro Zamora's roommate in the infamous Real World San Francisco house and good friend. Some parts were a little hard to read, thinking of Mom especially in the hospital scenes around Pedro's bed (They were all there when he passed away, friends, family, everybody). I read it really quickly a few weeks ago but it hit me pretty hard at the time. Dave read it also and no longer disses Judd anymore.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

This story is what happened when us war babies grew up and needed answers. When we got them, they weren’t what we expected at all.

Set in 1950s London, this book begins when Penelope is invited to impulsively share a cab with Charlotte, a stranger who sees her standing at the bus stop. She also gets invited to tea, which she accepts because she muses that if this were the beginning of a book, she has already started it off by getting in the cab - not going to the tea would cut off the story in the beginning.
I liked the characters and the first person perspective - I won't blither on more about the story itself, but this is a book that looks and feels like a frothy "chick lit" book on the outside, but has some real substance when you get into it. (Very like Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld).
It's also a treat to see the beginnings of the rock era in England - Johnnie Ray is the hottest thing ever to these girls. But Penelope's uncle from America has brought over some 45s and pictures of Elvis, soon to conquer everywhere in the next year.
Buy on Amazon!

Hot Ticket!?!

Kari and I were talking about the Khaled Hosseini reading and I told her about the gaggles of high school girls taking pictures of him after the reading with their cell phones. She asked if he was Hot. I said, yes, I think he is.
She had to unexpectedly have a day off this week due to testing snafus, and the bonus was that Barack Obama was on Oprah that day.
I mentioned that Obama and Hosseini could run for office, and Kari put in that they could run as the "Hot Ticket!" Kari is volunteering to be their campaign manager.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I went to the Khaled Hosseini event for One Book One County (San Mateo Reads) event, today at San Mateo Performing Arts center. I had loved this book, The Kite Runner, although it was so emotional and disturbing that both Kari and I are not sure if we would want to re-read it again soon.

Dr. Hosseini was asked at the end of the night whether he thought that "the pen is mightier than the sword" and whether his work would help to bring peace to Afghanistan.
He said he had no hopes of that, but that part of fiction writing is talking about the kinds of things that people don't want to talk about, but that they know to be true. For example, the Pashtun/Hazara prejudices he writes about in the novel - he's been criticized by other Afghans for "bringing out their dirty laundry."

Buy on Amazon!

Blankets by Craig Thompson

I've been wanting to read this for a while and just saw it in the graphic novel section of the San Mateo Public Library (hidden away upstairs in the teen/YA section there are DVDs, manga, graphic novels, plus a coffee stand!) - Sidebar, it feels completely sinful to wander around in a !library! with a steaming cup of hot coffee. But no signs against it!

I read the entire book one night while my partner was at a sleep center study. It was awesome. Set in Wisconsin, mostly in the winter, it begins with Craig and his brother as little boys, they share a bed, fight, and draw on large pieces of computer paper (this is pictured in the acknowledgements to thank their dad's friend who gave it to them. It was dot matrix computer paper, connected together with the holes on the edges, which I remember my dad bringing home from work when I was little).
They also challenge each other to walk on top of the crusty frozen snow without falling in, I remember this vividly from growing up in ND.

Craig eventually meets Raina, at a Christian summer camp and falls in love - she gives him a handmade quilt (more blankets!).
She is beautiful and hangs out with both the geeks and the popular people - unbellievable to Craig.

On BART the other day I was looking in the reflection of the window at the cell phone screen that an older gentleman ahead of me was looking at. I realized how common this practice probably is (the voyeuristic looking at people in reflections) but how awkward it is to describe.
An example of the kind of detail in this book is that Craig and Raina are shown looking at each other through the reflections in the windows of her dad's car when her dad is driving them home.
Look at all the words to show that but in the book it was one panel and it said it all. (Craig was in the back seat of the family minivan and so this was the best way for him to see her).
Buy on Amazon!

Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer, and YouTube

Recently I have been checking out a lot of Robert B. Sawyer's books from the library - this is the latest.

There's a lot here in the plot to try to summarize (and it's probably summarized best on Sawyer's site) but I'm thinking about it in conjunction with YouTube because of the descriptions of a "human overmind" in the book.

Heather Davis, a psychologist, has been trying to decipher a set of radio messages from our neighbors in Alpha Centauri (yeah, this is kind of like Contact, isn't it.)
They turn out to be the plans for building a Hypercube, a four-dimensional cube, also often called a tesseract.
(Sidebar - I remember how amazed I was when I first read the word tesseract somewhere other than in Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I naiively thought she had made up the word, so it was quite mindblowing to think that at least the concept existed, if not the mode of travel used in the book).


And Heather eventually gets this device built (its first form is as an unfolded hypercube that only stays rigid while under sunlight). After she gets inside one of the cubes, it folds itself up, disappears, and Heather inside can actually see and access the "overmind" of all humanity - "Neckering" or linking to different people through each other.

Kind of uber six degrees of separation, as she finds her husband's mind by first finding the prime minister of Canada and then working her way back down.
It's really a mind-blowing concept, but especially the way Sawyer describes it, with Heather getting caught up in historical figures' minds, etc, not all that different from websearching in process, but amazing to think of actually being able to look out through someone else's eyes and know what they're thinking (and all they have thought about before).

And then I came back to the computer, where YouTube was up (I was looking at a WoW machima movie earlier).
On one of the popular lists I find this series of videos from a man named Martin, who apparently has now passed away (the most recent video is from his wife).
I hadn't thought of YouTube as much as a "video journal" or archive medium, on top of all the Steven Colbert clips, but this really makes it an accessible (buy cheap webcam, get youTube account and net access) venue for people to tell their stories (and get them heard by more potential viewers in a more immediate way than even blogging does)

The end of the book calls out more hopeful uses for the overmind - Heather ends up being the ambassador for the human overmind when the Alpha Centauri overmind comes calling, which leads overall to greater peace in the world, less selfishness, etc. (Why would the human race as a whole feel empathy or a sense of community if it thinks humans are the only ones in the universe...)
There's so much dreck in YouTube that I'm definitely not saying that it's the path to all human understanding, but certainly it is contributing to the "small world" feeling.
I just did a search for Iraqi videos on YouTube. It appears most are being made by Americans in Iraq, instead of Iraqis themselves or else they are just spoofs.... but here's a kid singing.

Buy on Amazon!

Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea

Here's an interview she did before writing this book and here is the SF Chron's very long review.
Although this is set in a dilapidated town on the East Coast instead of in ND, and Trisha's family is way less dysfunctional than mine was, much of this is resonating with me - especially the "in crowd" clique, constantly concerned with fashion, shopping, and the mall, which Trisha ends up pretending to be part of in order to get a job at "Omigod!" which apparently is the trendiest spot to the clique.
I don't know, I can't really do it justice in this space. I now want to go read the rest of her stuff too, instead of just hovering in the bookstore and voyeuristically paging through Rent Girl, for example. This is her first actual fiction book, and looking at the Amazon blurbs, it amazed me that the whole book took place over the course of one day.
It just kind of washed over me in a rush and I wasn't really thinking about how quick the timespan was...

Buy on Amazon!
And she is going to be moderating a panel at the Women on Writing conference in March again this year.

Firebirds, edited by Sharyn November

Buy on Amazon!.
I originally became interested in this book because I evesdropped on Ellen Klages at the Neil Gaiman reading and found that she has a story in the new Firebirds anthology (Firebirds Rising) - which is her famous story about the girl raised by "feral librarians" (DZ overheard her mention this story which is why he perked up my ears too, normally we are not so nosy... ha ha).

But the new book is still "in processing" at the San Mateo library system so it may be a while before I can get a copy. I think this means that all the librarians are passing it around to read before they release it to the general public!

The editor of this book is Sharyn November (who I really want to meet after reading through her site - I'm not sure if I would be able to ask people who know me to describe me as she has), and also a motherless daughter whose page about her mother has inspired me). Plus, the Firebird imprint is also responsible for Pat's "The City" coming out in paperback finally.

I am just going to list the stories and authors that I really liked, with short blurbs about them so I can remember to go back and get their other works:

* The Baby in the Night Deposit Box - by Megan Whalen Turner. Best described almost as a girl raised by "feral bankers" - a baby is deposited into a bank and grows up there safe from the clutches of her evil aunt, until the evil aunt comes to make her withdrawal. This was so hilarious and sweetly odd that I told it to dz in the hot tub, and he actually listened to the whole thing.
I got all excited looking at the author bio which said she lives in Menlo Park but curses, she has moved to Ohio!

* Mariposa by Nancy Springer - really great story of a woman who has lost her soul (quite literally - it's a physical object in this world and she's about to get an artificial one put in, like plastic surgery). She decides to try to find it first, and returns to her childhood home and her mom and grandmother (who have certainly found their souls already or not lost them) to see if she's left it there.

* Medusa by Michael Cadnum - good to get the story from Medusa's perspective for once! As he said in the Author's Note, she couldn't always have been such a terrible creature.
Also note that he has a book out about the Vikings: Daughter of the Wind.

* The Black Fox - adaptation of trad. ballad by Emma Bull and illustrations by Charles Vess
Very nice to have a mini-comic story from Charles Vess here in the anthology

* Hope Chest by Garth Nix - a train pulls out of the station in a sleepy little town, leaving a large steamer trunk precariously balanced on the edge of the platform, with a little baby swaddled in a pink blanket on top. Of course the townspeople save her before she can fall, finding a note that reads, "Alice May Susan, born on the Summer Solstice, 1921. Look after her and she'll look after you."
And she does.

* Little Dot by Diana Wynne Jones - from the cat's point of view, about "her human" (a wizard, apparently) and also has a very interesting mobile hen-house type contraption that the cat can actually use to fly around the yard and the house with.
I am surprised I haven't yet read anything else by Diana Wynne Jones, she seems really quite awesome, and she wrote Howl's Moving Castle.

* Flotsam by Nina Kariki Hoffman
Jeff meets a young alien named Poppy at the basketball court, who needs to get back home (and looks human enough to pass until he tries to talk...). She also wrote a book recently called Catalyst which has first contact themes as well, but not the same characters or world.

Sidebar - we just watched Star Trek: First Contact last night on DVR - which I find fascinating because the 2063 year that they travel back to, the year of first warp drive and first contact, is not that far away. They can now shield microwaves using a "invisibility" cloaking device. Not far to visible light...

* Cotillion by Delia Sherman - I can't succinctly summarize this at all but to remember it - ball, faery world, Valentine brought back to human form by girl (and lots of cool music played on old instruments). This is the story of Tam Lin, btw, I am cribbing from a review elsewhere to remember that.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things: Buy on Amazon

I just finished this a couple days ago and it is very wondrous indeed. It's been inspiring me to write more stuff of my own and just imagine (for example, the butternut squash that was sitting on our countertop for several days started to assume a sinister aspect in my mind - is it a visitor from the fairy world? An alien? Why aren't we eating it? What's up with that?).
Dave did bake it up yesterday and made a soup of it, it was delicious and hasn't harmed us (yet).

I'm not going to say anything about the stories themselves as they should be a surprise and Dave hasn't finished the book yet. Neil has a great intro in the beginning where he talks about each story/poem in the collection - his intro is much better than anything I could do.

Dave and I were lucky to see him reading in Berkeley, Monday, Oct 2. It was a surprise from me to Dave, and he was very surprised, although he had guessed it was Neil Gaiman that morning (of course I did not confirm and remained cagey. It was good that the event was at the Berkeley Rep instead of at Cody's, because I could honestly say when we were driving up there, "No, we're not going to Cody's!")

We didn't get to stand in line for a signing (and so didn't get our copy of Good Omens signed, as well as American Gods, etc) and didn't go to Kepler's the next day for the signing there, but I think it worked out well that we got our pre-signed copy.

FngKestral on Flickr went to both events, here's his/her pictures. The Kepler's event looked like a bit of a madhouse and Gaiman looked much more tired there. The above picture shows him exactly how he looked at the Berkeley reading we went to. We were in the front row!!!

Sitting behind us was Ellen Klages, whom we were eavesdropping on because she mentioned being a Nebula Award finalist. After Dave found out her name, we told her we would read her work, and when I googled her at home we discovered she is a friend of Pat's, and has co-written several of the Exploratorium science books with her and that Ellen has her first novel (The Green Glass Sea) coming out in the next couple weeks. (post to follow on that, although I did order her chapbook story "Time Gypsies" and can write about that). Ellen also has won a Nebula in 2005. I'm planning as well to get the Firebirds Rising anthology from the library, to read Ellen's story about a girl being raised by "feral librarians".

826 Valencia Tutoring Notes

Tutoring Esmeralda

I did not write this, but someone doing drop-in tutoring at 826 Valencia last year did, and I think she is describing one of the girls I worked with last Monday (this Monday I had a job interview).

The girl's name is Esmeralda, and I recognize her easily entertained nature, especially about spelling -- in this journal note she laughed and laughed at how she was spelling "butterfly" - "butfly".
When I was helping her (if this is the same person) - she got into a giggling jag when trying to spell Mississippi (she didn't need to do this for her homework, she was being challenged to do it by her friend who was already very adept.)

"Miss-iss-i-pipi (ha ha ha giggle giggle)" I think it was all the "pees" that got her going.

etc...
Until finally she got it - "Miss-iss-ipp - i !"

I just signed up to help some fifth graders come up with stories in their classroom next Wednesday morning, then to go over to Rockridge for my 1:10 appt.

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Storm of Swords: Buy on Amazon

I can't remember if I have already written about the other books in this series.
This is the third one. I started this off originally by reading Game of Thrones, the first book, in a weekend in order to go to the Kepler's book club on a Sunday night and talk about it.
Pretty crazy.
I do kind of inhale these books even when I am not on a deadline, making it harder to write intelligently about them.
I hated Sansa in the first book but actually really like her now, that is one of the traits of these books, unexpected char and plot development - he has no qualms of killing off any character.
Other favorite people are Arya, Danaerys, Jon Snow, and Samwell Tarly.
I finished this on April 11 and immediately went to get Feast for Crows, the newest book.
In Storm of Swords, at one point I thought 3 main characters had just died. It turned out to be only one of them had died so it was a little less nervewracking.
He does kill off a lot of his characters but many do seem to keep coming back.

Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deavere Smith

Very inspirational and chatty book by Anna Deavere Smith, writer, actress, playwright, former Stanford professor and currently teaching at Yale!

Letters to a Young Artist: Buy on Amazon!

She's set the book up so that she is writing a series of letters to a young high school student, a painter named BZ who has "won a mentor" in a contest.
I want to take some notes on some of the memorable bits of advice below as I think I will bookcross this near the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland so that others will have a chance to read it (for free) also.

I actually have met Anna also, briefly when I was working in the office of the Dept of Drama at Stanford (under the incomparable Office Manager and all-around character, Athena, who should be the star of her own short story someday).
Anyway...I had answered the phone for Anna, took messages, put stuff in her mailbox, etc...and eventually got to see her play Twilight: Los Angeles (which is based on the LA riots) on my birthday for free as a comp play!
I had the weirdest experience concerning Anna's "fame" as an actress and also as someone who I actually "knew" - in the summer my sisters and I were driving back to Stanford from North Dakota and we stopped at a theater to see the movie Dave.
ADS is in Dave in a minor role, but still is onscreen for a good while, and I was totally frustrated because I knew I had seen her before and could not remember what other movie she was in.
When I was leaving the theater, it finally hit me.
This is Anna Deavere Smith who I've actually spoken to, in real life! I think this was the first time of just randomly seeing someone in a movie that I had seen first outside of movies and TV.
(I told this story to Karen from work on Friday night and she told a matching, yet opposite, story of seeing this gorgeous guy in the Gucci store, waving to him, and then trying to figure out why she knows him, since he had waved back and said hi. She realized that the guy had been Damon Wayans!)

Anyway.
I never actually took a class from ADS at Stanford, I sat in on her Interviewing class but didn't keep going with it. I think it looked more than a little bit scary and a lot of work. I wish I had taken the class.

This book is really quite inspiring just from its conversational tone - the letters are all one-sided, of course, from ADS to BZ, but she fills in the gaps for the other side, "So you say they're going to tear down your high school's painting studio and put in a biology lab? Fight back!"
and so on.

* Presence - example, Gloria Foster, the Oracle in the Matrix movies. Study photographs to learn about presence.
* "Being in it, and out of it, at the same time" - feeling as others is empathy - more useful and more important than sympathy, which is feeling for others
* confidence - determination sometimes even more important
* self-esteem "Be strong, be new, be you"
* discipline - example of Anna's swimming
* The Man - whoever has the money or whoever has the power to work out the money needed and the venue needed to expose your art - man or woman, etc.
* wow - she was a fat kid? hard to believe! She was terrible at jumping rope and so now is learning to jump rope to break some of those chains (perhaps I should take gymnastics or something...)
* procrastination - "active avoidance" - if she has something to do, she programs herself to do it so quickly that procrastination can't set in
* mentors - are different than teachers because you pick them, you seek them out
* from p. 87:

"I just got a call from my agent saying that there's a job for me on a television show called The West Wing. Have you seen it? It's written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote a movie called The American President, which I am in. And the actor Martin Sheen, whom I adore (and who was also in The American President), is in it. I don't think I'm going to do the show... Do you like it? Have you seen it?"

* From p. 88:

" You're funny! You think I'd be a fool not to do The West Wing?"

* From p. 89:

"My publicist agrees with you, he's saying, "Get on that plane, and go to LA!!!" He says The West Wing is a big hit."

* Lots of advice here about feeling alienated and depressed. BZ apparently was feeling pretty alone at her school as a high school painter.

Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell by Pat Murphy

"
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell is about the nature of reality and the nature of identity-and some of the confusions of being a writer. "
-Pat Murphy, from her website.
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (Buy on Amazon).


This book is just crazy good!
I remember liking it the first time I read it but is even more entertaining now after having met and hung out with Pat a little bit. (This copy was actually a gift from her, given to me at our gamegirls design meeting).

I'm not sure I'll ever again have the experience of reading a book with so many identities, alter egos, pseudonyms, and even characters named directly after the author, all sharing various traits with the author which are very fun to try to puzzle out, during a span of time when I'm actually in communication with the author herself.

In this book we have: a cruise ship, an author on board (Max Merriwell) who writes as two different pseudonyms (Mary Maxwell and Weldon Merrimax). And wait, Pat Murphy (the real one I've met) wrote and published two previous books under these same pseudonyms (Wild Angel by Mary Maxwell and There and Back Again by Max Merriwell).
And even weirder, the pseudonyms appear as real people on the ship as it is passing through the Bermuda Triangle, causing very mysterious events.
There's two women traveling on the ship, Susan, the main protagonist, who is a bit unsure of herself after a divorce and gets a good pep talk on confidence from Mary Maxwell - see below.

Susan is a big fan of both Mary and Max and has some commentary on these books she's reading (She's reading Wild Angel on board), and is traveling with a friend, also named Pat Murphy!
(the fictional Pat Murphy is a young graduate student in physics who is writing the Bad Girls Guide to Physics: and Pat and Susan had met while working at the SF Public Library)

Of course, Pat Murphy (the real author, the one who also works at the Exploratorium and studied biology) actually "collaborated" with the fictional character and put up a real website at the www.badgrrlzguide.com link above. I was really entertained to find this out, I think I didn't bother to check it when I first read the book.
(Apparently the hope was that the Exploratorium would eventually publish a Bad Grrlz Guide to Physics...I'd guess the URL was going to be used for that).

Pat's also provided some entertaining points on differences between real and fictional Pats (fictional is a better pool player, and so on) and includes in the website the recipe for the famous
Flaming Rum Monkey, invented in the novel.

On top of all this, for the price of admission we also get a lot of writing advice (Max is having a writers' workshop on board, saying a few things that I actually remember hearing from Pat when attending a seminar she gave at a conference) plus Clampers and a giant squid!

Here is the conversation between Mary Maxwell and Susan which I am trying to keep in mind when I find I'm losing confidence and/or trust in myself. The other thing that is good to remember at those times is Pat (real Pat) calling me "a force to be reckoned with!"

" Mary was leaning back in her chair, studying Susan's face. 'I think you tell yourself the wrong sort of stories,' Mary said.
'What?' Susan said, startled, but trying to remain relaxed.
'You kick yourself for getting lost. You tell yourself that you don't look good with short hair. You avoid taking the shortcut. Little things, but they all add up. You don't trust yourself at all.'
Susan didn't know what to say. 'I suppose you're right,' she began. 'But...'
Mary held up her hand. 'No buts,' she said firmly. 'You need to learn to trust yourself, to trust your abilities. There are so many possibilities for a woman who knows how to use her imagination.' Mary sipped her drink, still considering Susan.
Susan bit her lip, feeling inadequate. Mary seemed to be taking her on as a sort of project, and Susan wasn't sure how she felt about that. She leaned back in her chair, wondering how she might distract Mary and take her attention off of Susan's shortcomings." (bold type added by me above)

Susan sees Weldon Merrimax at the bar and thus is able to change the subject.
I really see a lot of myself in these comments about Susan. I showed this passage to my therapist because we've been talking a lot about me not being able to take praise very well and being so hard on myself. Also I totally do this same thing when I feel too under the microscope with my therapist, I try to change the subject and start talking about something completely different, even though we're actually there for the express purpose of looking at these kinds of things for me. Must be more than a little frustrating for her.

Hi-Liner Class of 2005 Family Histories

So I was looking around on the website of my alma mater, Valley City High School, and saw this interesting link to several essays written by Mrs. Wendel's English class on their families' personal histories. (Mrs. Wendel was my 7th Grade English teacher, this is an 11th grade class here).

Since they are public record and out on the web I don't feel any guilt in linking to them and maybe perhaps being inspired by them for other stories. There's a lot of North Dakota grit here just in the first few stories in the As.
I do notice that the habit of starting your essay with a question "Have you ever... " and then "Well I ..." is firmly entrenched in these kids.

Hi-Liner Histories

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This book I picked up in the hallway at work, it had a "Free, take me" sign sticking up out of it, written on paper from the nearby print shop.

It's a story of Peekay, a young English boy growing up in South Africa, surviving initially in a boarding school where he is regularly beaten up by Afrikaaner boys who hate him because he is English and England sent many Afrikaaners to concentration camps during the First Boer War.
He eventually finds mentors when home for vacations, and spends most of the happy times of his childhood actually in a prison where his friend and mentor Doc has been imprisoned (mainly just for being German). He starts out coming to continue taking piano lessons from Doc but finds another passion in the boxing team at the prison and builds a lengthy successful boxing career which continues on to boarding school.

It's a very strong individualist, survivalist story, another reviewer on Amazon compared it to "The Kite Runner" and it is very similar but perhaps a bit more episodic and not as emotionally jarring as "The Kite Runner".

Game Developer's Conference, Pat, Ames, and Writing

Spent most of the afternoon on Friday with Pat walking around the Game Developer's Conference, apologies to Pat for this picture because I forgot to get a better one of her later on.
This is Pat listening/ talking to Ames and I after we sat down to have a beer after wandering around the show, and then Ames saw me and ran over to say hi.
This was such a fun conversation that I forgot to get my coat out of our company's booth before the booth was dismantled, and our studio head took it back in his car.

Pat and Ames found they share a love of wolf stories, which was quite cool! Ames and I were also inspired to write, especially to try writing in the morning although I meant to do that this morning (Saturday) but did not.
In riding home on light rail I found also that Pat and I have a similar attitude on the "adventure" of public transit: it's kind of a pain and a stress to get on and to the public transit, but once you're on it, you don't really get as stressed as you do when driving and you really feel when driving as if you could have controlled the situation if there's traffic, etc. But on transit, if it's late, it's late. Pat actually took BART to Caltrain, then Caltrain to light rail, to get to the show.

SunPath's early writing

I took a picture of this picture with my treo and there it is. It would probably look nicer if I used my other camera, but oh well.
I'm using the site "www.platial.com" to make a list of places I've lived, but don't have many pictures I've actually taken to put in there until getting to the California era.

This is my Treo wallpaper to inspire me to write more.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials (paperback trilogy): Buy on Amazon!

I first read these at least a year ago but reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell made me think of Philip Pullman.
Both have very believable worlds that incorporate magic, fantasy, and in His Dark Materials, almost a whole alternate version of our world.

The whole concept of daemons as being extensions of your personality and unique only to you - I read a quote from Philip Pullman where he said kids were writing to him saying that after reading this they felt that they have their own daemons, and he pointed out, we all do. (If you have not read the book, these daemons are not evil "demons" - they're more like very intelligent familars which are there to help each person, augment their strengths, etc).

I haven't read this recently so I can't go on and on about it but the characters of Lyra and Iorek Bjornson are probably my favorites.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Buy on Amazon

'I have a bit of a problem now that the fairy roads are all open ... what do I do with them?'. - a quote from the author in a recent interview.

I got this book for my birthday about 2 weeks ago from my boyfriend, and am finally almost done with it. Of course this is to be expected to take even me this long, because it has 846 pages!

It is really its own world, an alternate "fantastic" (meaning not fantasy like dwarves and giants, or even magical magic as in Harry Potter with wands and such). The story is set in nineteenth century England, during the "Revival of English Magic" led by the two foremost magicians, Strange and Norrell.
They are actually commissioned to do magic - for example, Strange goes off to Portugal to help fight against the French with Lord Wellington. And there is a whole world of magical history which Clarke gives us a glimpse of, with very detailed footnotes regarding magical deeds and wizardry of the past, fairy stories, and more.

It is hard to describe, but I am loving it. I laughed out loud when hearing of how Strange moved the city of Lisbon temporarily to America to avoid being attacked by the French, but then has to send magical messages to the troops still in Portugal so they'll know where the troops are.
The birds around the armies are enchanted to sing in rhyme,
"Lord Wellington says.. blah blah" and that's how the message is conveyed (also by little cakes baked in the shape of letters by a baker who has no idea what they're spelling out).

Anyway, very very English. I remember being in England and how entertained we were by the wordiness everywhere.

"Way Out" instead of Exit.
The Construction Sites had about a paragraph of text: "This Road will be closed for this long because of this big project which is taking place for this reason and so on"
where in the US we might just say "Road Closed Due to Construction. "

Susanna Clarke talking about her influences on her site:
I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why — except that they know things other people don't and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
In C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories there are only two magicians. One is weak and wicked, and the other barely gets two lines of dialogue.
But they both fascinated me. One (the weak one) has a tray of magic rings, green and yellow, as shiny and bright as sweets. They're magic, they're jewelry and they look like scrummy sweets. What's not to like? In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could. The closest model was Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea stories. While you're reading them, magic seems perfectly real. You feel it must exist and it must be just as Le Guin describes.

Y The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

This is a really great graphic novel series - recommended by a friend at work who used to work in a comic book store.

I've read the first 4 softcover collections from the list below, we are probably going to be getting issues 5 and 6 this weekend.

The question is, what would happen if some unexplained phenomenon caused all the men and male mammals in the world to die at the same time, except for one twenty-something guy and his male monkey?

Yorick Brown is the guy in question here, and has been so far, very faithful to his girlfriend in Australia, even though he has no idea whether or not she is still alive. The book is beautifully drawn and the story just sucks you in completely, with all kinds of secrets, missing characters (Yorick's sister, the similarly Shakespearean named Hero, for example).

Reading comics for me is like watching a movie or a TV show, or having a dream. I just inhale them, especially when they are good. And I have such an unending supply of them available from my boyfriend's collection.

1. Unmanned: Issues #1-5 - bought and read together with #2
   
2. Cycles: Issues #6-10 - see above
   
3. One Small Step: Issues #11-17 - bought and read last weekend with #4
   
4. Safeword: Issues #18-23 - see above
   
5. Ring Of Truth: Issues #24-31
6. Girl on Girl: Issues #32-36
7. Paper Dolls: Issues #37-42 (Outs May/17/06)

Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

I heard Ruthanne Lum McCunn speak at the Women on Writing conference on my birthday as well and read this book that weekend. I had just kind of vaguely heard of her but the book really intrigued me.
It's a fictional telling of a historical story - a Chinese girl is sold into slavery by her father (even though she is his precious "thousand pieces of gold).
She eventually ends up traveling to America and apparently pretty narrowly escaping having to work as a prostitute. One of the men in the small mining town where she ends up in Oregon befriends her, helps her start up her own boarding house business, and eventually they fall in love.
It was very sweet how their relationship is described, and I did really enjoy the story, but I was almost surprised that there was not more happening in the last half of the book.

It's also a bit horrible to think of but I was almost thinking that Polly's experiences before she met Charlie would be even worse than they were. I think maybe the writing even in the beginning lacks some drama, Polly is really going through some hard events but it doesn't hit me as viscerally as some other works.
I did enjoy the book though, it was a pretty relatively fast read and interesting to hear McCunn talk about the research she did to write the book.

The New Woman, by Jon Hassler

The New Woman: Buy on Amazon!
I was happy to see this book at Kepler's when I randomly decided to look to see what older Hassler books they had there, a few months ago.
A new book! Another visit back to the small Minnesota town of Staggerford, home to Agatha McGee, a retired Catholic teacher now in her eighties, who up until this book has lived happily in her own home.

Jon Hassler is one of my favorite writers and also my former "pen pal" when I was in high school, as he had responded to a letter asking him about his writing career initially, and then would send little postcards with updates about what he was working on, and what was going on with him.

That building on the book cover looks like it could be in Valley City, North Dakota, my hometown. I first met Agatha McGee in the pages of "Staggerford", Hassler's first novel, which spans a week in the life of Miles Pruit, Agatha's boarder.
The book is short but warm and comforting, and I don't have it in front of me right now to be more detailed, but it's like visiting an old friend from home to read it.

Hassler's impetus to write at 37: (from his web page linked above)

"I can trace my desire to be a writer back to the age of 5 when I was being read to by my parents and cousins and uncles and aunts. However, not until I was 37 did I, upon waking one morning in September 1970, hear a voice in my head saying, Half your life is over, Hassler, you'd better get started."

With a pen and notebook, he headed for the library at the Brainerd community college where he was teaching, and began "A Story Worth Hearing." He hasn't looked at it in years but doubts that the never-published story was worth hearing. It was, however, a start.

He took a sabbatical in 1975-76, moved into his nonwinterized cabin 75 miles northwest of Brainerd that October and started what became "Staggerford." It was based on diaries he had kept of his real-life teaching experiences. He had been haunted by a murder in the small northern Minnesota town of Clearbrook in the 1950s, and its echo is in the book.

Women on Writing Conference, Pat Murphy

I am really jazzed right now because I just went to a "Women on
Writing" conference today and got to meet one of my favorite authors,
Pat Murphy. I did also get many other books signed and heard Janice Mirikitani but I want to give her her own blog entry after I have actually read her book I bought.

Here's the blog spiel I wrote here about Pat Murphy's book The City Not Long After...
Here's her
biblio/awards page
She is awesome!

I had finally found a copy of this book (The City Not Long After) in a
used bookstore after looking for it hither and yon(I hear a paperback edition is coming
out this spring) and so I emailed her since she lives in the Bay Area
to see if she would be signing somewhere since I now finally have a book of my own to sign, and she told me she would be speaking
and signing books at the conference, so I decided to go, especially
since it was on my birthday.

It was very inspirational, I had told her it was my birthday so she
actually brought another one of her books for me as a present (although I didn't take it because it was the collection of short stories that Dave gave me initially that got me started reading her work.) The workshop that she led was also very productive, I actually have a little germ of a plot that I did not have yesterday, as she led us through the questions she asks herself when getting started on a new writing idea.

It was so nice to actually have an extended conversation instead of my
usual tongue-tied talking at book signings, where I usually say only:
"Thank you so much for coming... my name is Solveig - yes, pronounced
Sol-vay...yes it is a Norwegian name...I really like your work.
Bye..."

It also turns out there's an additional connection in that we have some common interests in the game industry . . .

North of Hope by Jon Hassler

Jon Hassler!!! - Link to his official "Writing Room"
North of Hope is being re-released in paperback!

January, 2006
I just happened to re-read North of Hope over the last few days because I felt like it, and then was really happy to see at Keplers that he has written a new book The Good Woman which I will also write about when I have finished it.

I have been reading and enjoying Hassler's books for at least 15 years. In 1990 around the time that North of Hope came out (and after reading A Green Journey) I also started writing letters to many people quite frequently. Uncles, aunts, cousins, pen pals, and also Jon Hassler. Perhaps I was inspired by all the letter writing in A Green Journey, I think I was.

Most people that I knew responded, and to my surprise, so did Mr. Hassler. The initial letter was on two pages of white note paper, which I still have at home in Valley City, and then I also got several other postcards in response to my chatty letters telling him what was going on with me and asking him what he was writing. The postcards of course I have also saved too.
On the first letter he had responded to one of my questions about being a writer, and he said something like "You needn't decide whether to become a writer or not. " and said something about how the voice would become too insistent to ignore, but I'm not remembering exactly how he worded the last part.
I'm not sure, maybe my voice is getting more insistent but it's certainly not loud enough yet to keep me from ignoring it (although I almost did the "write a novel during November" challenge this year.)

Rookery Blues was written during the time of the postcards, and I know from the postcards that he was thinking of calling it The Icejam Quintet. It felt like I was on the inside track when it came to what he was planning to write, which was fun.
We met once at least at a book signing, he remembered one of my letters from one of the teacher descriptions I wrote. ("that crazy teacher!")

His books are really well drawn from life in the Midwest, specifically in small towns in Minnesota -- about teachers and priests, old ladies and teenagers. And most of them are Catholic, which I am not but I found fascinating then and also now as well.
I was just reading his new intro to the North of Hope paperback where he was talking about being a "priest-watcher" all his life - I think perhaps I have been a bit of a "teacher-watcher" as well.

His first book, Staggerford, came out in 1977 when Hassler was 44. Staggerford, and the other books set in and around that town, including A Green Journey, The Love Hunter, and Simon's Night, all have their dark moments but they have much more of a cozy humor to them.

North of Hope is probably the darkest of all his books but it may also be one of the best. You want things to work out better for the characters but if they did it would just be a pretty sappy love story just like anything else.

(His book A Green Journey was made into a TV movie starring Angela Lansbury and Denholm Elliot. This was a bit cheesy - the movie, not the book, which I loved. The biggest problem I remember was Denholm Elliot, who was not believable to me as James O'Hannon because I had just seen him as a bumbling fool in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We (my sisters and I) had our own casting for James O'Hannon but I can't remember now who it was. Definitely better than Denholm. It was someone tall, white hair, piercing blue eyes, but not Paul Newman as he wasn't old enough at the time I think).

When I got to Stanford I took a class from John L'Heureux, who writes even darker novels about priests, teachers, and professors. L'Heureux is almost like the other side of Hassler it seemed to me. I wrote to Hassler about L'Heureux and told L'Heureux about Hassler but neither seemed to know anything about the other.

The Birth of the Chess Queen, by Marilyn Yalom

I saw this book over the holidays when shopping for gifts for other people and had to pick it up for myself (and for my boyfriend if he wants to read it).

It is a really fascinating history of how and why we have such a powerful female piece on the chess board (the queen) who was not even present for several centuries of the game's history... (originally in the Middle East this piece was a male vizier who was much weaker, only moving one space diagonally).

She's a senior scholar at Stanford's Institute for Women and Gender who has written extensively on women's history, and she did a great job of telling her own story of first becoming intrigued by this question and then going through her own research to get closer to the answer.
The book also talks a lot about how chess was played over the years -- it was a metaphor for courtship and love at some points - so that a couple shown playing chess in a medieval tapestry were not seen to "just" be playing chess...

Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins

This was hilarious! I think I bought it in one of the many frenzies of book buying at Keplers recently.
She covers almost my entire living memory of American politics, from Carter up to the present Shrub. It was fun to read her recent essays, but even better to read her take on the past as well.
Even better, the stories on Bush senior, who I do not remember as being as entertaining as his son. Make sure you read her recollection of when Bush regaled listeners by telling the thrilling tale of the gladiator who bit a lion in the balls!

Narnia media mania! Chronicles,Movie, Companion, Game!

Bought the movie companion collectors' book at Keplers the week before the movie came out because I could not resist. Also bought the Nintendo DS game a couple weeks earlier as well (partly for work research :-)





Reread Chronicles of Narnia right after seeing the movie (starting Dec 9)

Read new edition of Companion to Narnia after getting it for Christmas from my lovely sister...

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
I'm so happy to see so much about Narnia all over the place, it is now actually somewhat "trendy" to know about Narnia.
I always felt when I was a kid just like the Pevensies felt when being teased by their pre-dragon cousin Eustace - "Kids who talk and talk about Narnia tend to get barmier and barmier..."
It seemed as if no one knew what I was talking about and now people can come out of the woodwork and talk more about having liked Narnia in the past and the present.
It was quite fun to revisit the whole series again after having seen the movie, but of course we always read them in the original order (not the new post 1994 order) - the true order beginning with "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" not with "The Magician's Nephew".

I also really enjoyed reading the "Companion to Narnia" by Paul Ford as it is a new edition from the one I read a while ago, with new maps and new essays, plus a whole discourse that underscores how much better it is to read them in the original order!
Very hypertextual to read as it is in encyclopedia form and you are led from entry to entry either by whim or because you suddenly remember a character or idea and want to hear more about it.

Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

Actual date read (early December)
This is a book by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. - my sister gave it to me at Thanksgiving.
She read out a couple of the poems in the book at Thanksgiving and they were very moving.
It really made me wish that the world's women can continue to try to gather, lead, work for change, although I have really being doing none of this myself of course.
What would be the world be like if more of its leaders were women who might be more likely to talk to each other to resolve more of the problems?

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Click picture for link to NPR interview...
I just finished this book (bought at Kepler's last night) which won one of the big non-fiction book awards, and like Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" said, "I hated to read it and I loved to read it" at the same time.

Joan's husband died suddenly in Dec 2003 and this is her story of how she got through the year after that. I actually ended up identifying even more with her experiences of her daughter being sick, because it reminded me of when my mom was sick.

Although this really pushed a lot of emotional buttons for me, it was reassuring because I always thought magical thinking in terms of thinking "If I would have done something different or been different, it would have saved her" is something that mainly children experience (it always strikes me as sounding so wacky) ... but here is Joan Didion having the same thoughts.

I don't even remember consciously thinking that I could actually have done anything to save her (my mom, not Joan Didion :-)
as a 12 year old (when she got sick) and 16 year old (when she died), but my therapist says this is the root of much of this self-doubt, self-punishing that we do... we would be good people and deserving of (love, good jobs, etc) if we had been able to save this person that we loved.

So it was very reassuring that Joan Didion as a mature person was also going through things that happened before her husband died and trying to find ways that she screwed up by letting it happen.
And things like wanting to keep his shoes because unconsciously she wants him to be able to return.

Anyway, it is a very good book and it may bring up some stuff for you also but in the end I am very glad I read it. (And it's fairly short.)