Technical Difficulties

This is another entry mostly for me, but also for anyone who may find it useful. I find that I frequently want to refer back to previous book posts when discussing current reading, and it's getting very difficult to find the post I want because there are so many of them. So this is the master list of book posts. I will keep updating it as I read more books.

Master list moved here 09/16/2016.

This is just to let everyone know that I'm going to be off the internet for the next couple of months. Do not panic; although it is a medical issue, it is nothing life-threatening or paradigm-shifting.

Hopefully, I'll be back, at least in a limited capacity, by the New Year.

In the meantime, two things:

1. Since someone asked & I suspect other people will be interested in the answer: no, there is not currently any legally available e-format (or paper format for that matter) of either Mélusine or The Virtu. This is because I, personally, do not have a useable electronic version of either book and thus cannot self-publish them through Lulu and/or Smashwords (or another of their ilk), which I promise you is still the plan. I am really, wretchedly sorry about this state of affairs, but making any of the files I do have into useable versions of the text of the published books is something I cannot do right now.

2. If you need to get in touch with me, to ask me a question or tell me about something important, my email address is semonette (at) sarahmonette.com. I will be checking my email, although not necessarily every day.

Best wishes to you all for the rest of 2012.

1. Yesterday, the CEM of The Tempering of Men started its journey back to New York. If it doesn't get there by Tuesday, it's because of UPS, not me and the $74 I shelled out.

2. Yesterday, also, I had my first full-length dressage lesson since July 31st. (I'd had a couple of lessons previously, but they'd been much shorter, as my dressage instructor has been very careful and cautious about overtaxing my ankle.) This morning, my thighs are telling me ALL ABOUT IT. I have never been so happy about sore muscles in my life.

3. The orthopedic appointment on Friday went very well. My orthopedist was amazed at the range of motion my ankle has achieved; it was much more than he'd expected. (The word "awesome" may have been used. *g*) I have the green light to start weaning myself from the lace-up brace, and I don't have to go back to the orthopedic clinic until June.

4. These three things need listing because, otherwise, I've had a crappy week--due mostly, it seems, to PMS (depressed, clumsy, exhausted, retaining water like a camel, plus the random menstrual cramps like being stabbed in the kidney.) The Mirena has certainly reduced menstrual flow (which was not something I was ever actually particularly concerned about), but other than that, all it seems to accomplish is making everything as irregular as fuck. Gynecologist appointment in January, and we will most certainly be discussing the matter.

5. I haven't done this for a while, so: if you are a reader of this blog, and you would like to introduce yourself, please feel free to do so in the comments to this post. This offer is 100% obligation free; there is no pressure here of any kind.

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

For tonight, the plan is to collapse in a corner and twitch quietly.

Point the first: I would like to remind those of you commenting on the Red Seas Under Red Skies post that Scott is a friend of mind. I am not, nor would ever dream of, asking you to censor your opinions, but I am asking that you remember that this author, like me, is a real person and deserves the courtesy of being discussed as such. Also, it's entirely possible that he will read what you say about him and his books.

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Point the second: in a nutshell, why I changed my name when I got married:

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Point the third: I don't talk about politics on this blog, and that's going to continue, but for the record, the fact that I share a given name with that particular VP candidate makes me cringe.

Paul Di Filippo reviews A Companion to Wolves (among others) for the Washington Post and thinks it's a soap opera for furries and yaoi readers. On the other hand, the ALA's Reading List Council thinks it's worth a mention.

ETA: myalexandria has a very thoughtful post about Isolfr and feminism. To which I can mostly say, yeah, that's what we meant.

wild_patience isn't real keen on me, but I can't argue with her raving about Bear.

More commentary on Mélusine from imani.

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N.b., I collect links to reviews of my books for several reasons. One is that, as a writer, I'm curious about what people think. Another is that, as a long-time reader and a literary scholar, I'm fascinated by the different ways one book can be read and interpreted and reacted to. Now, I could chart reactions to any book, any author's body of work. But, you know, I've got my experimental sample right here. Also, collecting reviews of somebody else's work seems weird and creepy and even a little stalkerish. Also, although this may sound counter-intuitive, it's easier for me to be impartial about reactions to my work than it would be for me to be impartial to reactions about somebody else's book that I loved (or hated).

But here's the thing. Mélusine was published in 2005. The last time I even looked at it, except for fact-checking for The Virtu and The Mirador and Corambis, was sometime in 2004. Today, in 2008, my head is full of Corambis and, guiltily, the stories I want to write once Corambis is finished. I've moved on, in other words. Which is not to say that I don't still love Mélusine and that I'm not proud of it. Because I do and I am. But, to swerve for a moment into a possibly florid metaphor, my novels (I hope) are like a chambered nautilus marking my growth as a writer and as a person, and Mélusine is a chamber I've grown out of. This is, I think, the way it should be. You shouldn't get stuck on one novel, one moment in your writing life, one chamber of your nautilus. So, for me, Mélusine is a record of who I was and what I was thinking, rendered in fictional form, in the first few years of the new century. Whereas (to pick an example at random from books I read and loved last year) Peter Watts' Blindsight is something I'm thinking about right now. I'm engaged with it in a way I'm not engaged with my own work by the time it gets published. I'm far more likely to be upset with a hypothetical someone saying something wrong-headed about matociquala's Dust than I am with a hypothetical someone saying something wrong-headed about The Mirador, because I love Dust in a way you can only love books you didn't write yourself.

Which leads me to my further point: I do not post links to reviews so that people will defend my honor. My honor's fine, thanks. I post the links so that I can find them again and because I think they're interesting. Which, you know, is maybe just egocentrism. But hey. My sandbox. I can build my sandcastle any way I want.

There are a lot of y'all reading this blog.

I'm figuring it's time for one of those periodic getting-to-know-you posts. So if you'd like to introduce yourself, or you'd like to ask a question (any question, although I reserve the right not to answer), here's a superlative spot to do it at.

This is not a pressure-y kind of thing. Only an invitation.

And I'll reiterate a couple of things:

1. I almost never add people reciprocally. Because, well, I have 25 people on my reading list right now, and that's almost too many. There are many people whom I like and admire whose blogs I don't read. Apparently, I just need that processing power for something else.

2. I only reply to comments if I actually have something to say. However, I read all comments, and I am always, always grateful for them. (N.b., excluding the occasional and inevitable troll.) I forget to say that a lot, because sometimes I'm kind of a rotten excuse for a human being. But I'm definitely reading and interested.

So here. The lines are open and you're on the air.

There are over 500 of you.

::waves to everybody::

Since I have to write a synopsis of The Mirador today, and since synopsis-writing is an activity which I both hate and am incredibly bad at, I'm going to issue an open invitation:

Tell me something about yourself.

It's an invitation, obviously--nothing even as strong as a request--so if you don't want to, no harm, no foul. But if you'd like to (and this applies as much to the people I know as the people I don't) ... tell me something. Make it as long or as short, as serious or as goofy as you want. If you are a reader who doesn't have a LiveJournal account, that's totally cool, too--just please remember to sign your comment.

So as you may have noticed, I haven't posted for quite some time. And partly this has been because I have been very busy, but partly because I am feeling overwhelmed by my reading list.

I know. I hit the wall at 30 that most people hit at 150 or 300 or never. But there it is, and I don't get to argue about it, either.

So if you notice yourself off my list--or if you're one of the now hundreds of people I haven't added reciprocally--it's not because I don't like and admire you. It's just because either I cut back or I stop using LJ all together. And that doesn't seem like a happy solution.

Thank you, everybody, for answering yesterday's question (and feel free to chime in if you haven't and want to). The general, slightly plaintive consensus seems to be that it would be really groovy if I'd write more about books other than my own.

Which is fair. I recognize that's something I'm good at, and it's something I enjoy--and it delights me, truly, utterly delights me, that other people enjoy it, too. There are, however, problems, namely that in the Venn diagram of books, the categories of "books I enjoy" and "books susceptible to litcrit" have a fairly narrow band of overlap. Notice, please, that "books susceptible to litcrit" and "good books" don't have a one-to-one correspondence, either. One of the reasons (I am convinced) that the academic establishment continues to sneer at, condemn, and otherwise frantically try to disavow sf/f/h is that the conventions of literary criticism and the conventions of specfic are inherently at odds.

What you learn to do when you learn to do literary criticism is explicate symbolism. You learn to look for patterns, metaphors, seemingly ordinary details that, when prodded, emit the odor of Authorial Intent. As an example, the book that taught me how to do this is Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. My eleventh grade English teacher assigned a paper on the imagery of light and dark in TSL, and I went through and noted down every damn use of light and dark in the whole damn book. There's a lot of them, and they all fit together into this beautiful, coherent, mechanical apparatus; all you have to do is wind it up and watch it go. Now, as you practice litcrit, you learn to be more subtle about it, and you learn to interpret details that don't reek of Authorial Intent (the most fun I ever had in college was a paper ripping The Woman in White to shreds, reading persistently and perversely against what Wilkie Collins intended). But the fundamental gesture of literary criticism as it is practiced in scholarly circles is: cherchez la femme le symbole.

Enter speculative fiction. Now, horror (ironically) is pretty much okay, because horror is all about the gradual process of the symbolic becoming literal. But science fiction and fantasy make their symbols literal from the very get-go--think of The Left Hand of Darkness where there's nothing metaphorical about Estraven's androgyny--and leave literary critics with nothing to do.

Now, if you dig down, you can find layers in sf&f that respond to traditional literary treatment. There's a paper I never got around to writing about the way in which The Lord of the Rings is a war between the genres of epic, several different types of pastoral, and the novel. But you have to dig and search and in general behave like archaeologists instead of literary critics. Only not like archaeologists in the obvious way--those are called textual critics and they have plenty of academic oomph, thank you very much--but archaeologists of story. Not even so much of the story's content as of its pattern-making. And that's (a.) hard, and (b.) something academically trained readers haven't been trained for. It's much easier to say there's nothing outside the box than it is to try to come to grips with the fact that the stuff outside the box is outside the box because the rules inside the box don't work on it.

Or you have to bring a different set of tools to the dig. This is one reason science fiction and feminism get along so well, because a feminist reading of a text doesn't depend on symbolism; it depends on the deconstruction of socially-constructed gender roles, and that's a game that can be played in books with characters of one sex, two sexes, three or more sexes, or no sexes at all. Another paper I wrote in college was about gender and feminism in Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, talking about stories where even biological sex was an iffy concept at best, much less gender. Feminist criticism doesn't analyze the text in-and-of-itself; it analyzes the text in its social matrix, and that gives it a way to talk about f&sf that more conventional schools of criticism lack. Marxist criticism has the same advantage, although it hasn't, to my knowledge, been wielded with the same efficacy.

Which brings us back around to me and my reading. I don't want to write about books unless I have something interesting and non-obvious to say (i.e., not in the business of doing Reader's Guides here, kthnx), and with f&sf, which wear their hearts on their sleeves, that's not always a given. (Now, if I were an academic, I'd be all Liberty Leading the People with reinventing litcrit vocabulary and praxis to do justice to f&sf, but I'm not an academic. I'm a novelist, and I have things to do with my time that define for me as better.) The sad truth of the matter is that I'm bored by "mainstream" literature (which can be neatly and tautologically defined as "books on which academic literary criticism works"); between the sense of obligation engendered by years and years of English courses, the idea prevelant today that literary protagonists must be unsympathetic in one way or another, and the fact that by the standards of the genres I love, nothing freaking happens--trying to read "literary fiction" is a misery and a burden and I'm not going to do it to myself anymore. And then there's well-written entertainment literature (I'm thinking here of series mysteries), which tends to be seamless in cheerful defiance of a discipline that exists to pick apart seams. I love Emma Lathen nearly as much as I love DLS, but I have nothing to say about them. ("Emma Lathen" having been a pseudonym for two women, whose real names I can never remember--although a quick Google gives me a site that tells me: Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Hennisart. I've never found any of their R. B. Dominic mysteries--are there any eyewitnesses out there?) And while I could write an essay on homophobia in Ngaio Marsh ... it's an ugly, unhappy topic, and I don't want to give it energy I could be giving to something else when the short version works just as well: there's homophobia in Ngaio Marsh; it's blatant and offensive, it makes me despise Alleyn and Fox, whom I don't want to despise, and it hurts. The worst offender is Singing in the Shrouds.

So this leaves us with the occasional essay, like my diatribe on Derleth, proving that it's very easy to practice litcrit on bad literature of any stripe, and otherwise I have to see something in something I'm reading that will reward the particular kind of digging I'm equipped to do--and I have to have both energy and time to do it. I was thinking about it last night, and I'm continuing to think about it this morning, and I'm toying fairly seriously with doing a series on Sherlock Holmes. Because there's stuff in those stories, even if Conan Doyle didn't really intend to put it there.

But it's kind of going to depend on what the rest of my life throws at me.

(No one, by the way, should be worried that they've made me defensive or upset. You haven't.)