Eugene Fischer

Tag: Reading2015

Reading 2015: Final Roundup

MyRealChildren_Jo-WaltonI never did a Reading2015 post for December, but I only read one book during the month, My Real Children by Jo Walton, which I consumed on Christmas day. I adored it. It’s the story of a woman who, in her old age, can remember living two distinctly different lives, stemming from a single choice in her youth. It’s an alternate history of alternate histories, with chapters alternating between two very different life courses that, in the end, ask you to make an impossible ethical and aesthetic judgement, what Ursula Le Guin on the back cover calls “a sort of super Sophie’s Choice.” I’m always a sucker for branching narrative, the way the space between the threads opens room for new resonances and emotions, just as a paper towel doubled over can absorb more than the same sheet applied flat. This book might just be my new go-to example of the form.

So here’s where that leaves my stats for 2015:

  • 67 total books
  • 35 prose books
  • 32 graphic novels
  • 26 women authors (writer or artist)
  • 44 books authored or co-authored by women
  • 33 male authors (writer or artist)
  • 28 books authored or co-authored by men.
  • Best month: September (12 books – all GNs)
  • Worst month: December (1 book – prose)

As with last year, here the the books (not counting re-reads) that stand out in most my memory (which isn’t exactly the same thing exactly as how much I liked them):

  1. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
  2. My Real Children by Jo Walton
  3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas Disch
  5. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  6. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
  7. Tenth of December by George Saunders
  8. Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
  9. Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
  10. Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman
  11. Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
  12. The Wilds by Julia Elliott
  13. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Some interesting things include the presence of only one graphic novel, despite the form making up nearly half of my reading. That’s largely due to my having re-read all of Dykes to Watch Out For, all of which were ineligible for this list.  Another is which Mary Gaitskill book made the list. I think that in many ways the collection Because They Wanted To is the stronger of the two Gaitskill volumes I read this past year, but it’s her first novel my mind alights on more easily. And I can’t do anything about the wiring of memory, and what it may have to do with two books I read in just the last two month making my top 5.

It was my resolution for 2015 to read 100 books, and I fell short not just of that mark, but of my 2014 mark of 73 books read. I attribute this primarily to having started doing some work for television, which prompted me to massively increase my television watching. I would say the TV I’ve consumed, added to the hundreds of hours of Fallout 4 I played in November, is easily equal to 33 books. But since I don’t have any better ideas, I’m going to go ahead an roll over my 2015 resolution to 2016, and aim for 100 books read in the year to come.

Reading 2015: November

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As predicted, Fallout 4 dominated my media consumption time this past month. The first three books here I read in the week before the game came out, and the last two I read in the final days of the month, while traveling for Thanksgiving and far away from my console.

  1. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie – It took until about halfway through the book for the story to cohere and reveal its stakes, but once it did I was deeply invested. I’m not sure I found the linguistic handling of gender as mind-blowing as other readers did, though I did think it very clever. This is enjoyably chewy space opera, and miles better than I expect first novels to be. My only real complaint was how many places the plot hinges on coincidence, with multiple characters just happening to pop up again despite the passage of decades and centuries. To its credit the book does at least address the issue, by having the main character ruminate on the dominant culture’s religious treatment of coincidence each time, but I found this gesture to mollify more than it excused.
  2. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
  3. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie – I read these last two back-to-back, as one long story, and so don’t really have opinions on them as distinct entities. It says something that I was invested enough after the first book (which I’d owned since it came out but just finally got around to reading) that I picked up and read the rest of the trilogy immediately. And I think I’m glad I waited until the series was finished, because approaching it this way was quite enjoyable. Books 2 and 3 are palpably smaller in scale than book 1; the Space Operatics feel comparatively muted. But the character work being done is in many ways superior to the first book, in no small part because the premise is already established.
  4. Superman: Last Son of Krypton by Elliot S! Maggin – I last read this book back when my age was in the single digits. While it’s set in a very 70s era of the Superman mythos, and the dialog tics feel dated, there is a tremendous amount here that captures things I love about Superman. This Superman isn’t naive at all, he’s brilliant and principled, and his relationship with Lex Luthor has the resonant complexity of myth. Also, rereading it, this is clearly where I learned the word “philtrum,” (misspelled throughout as “filtrum”) which is notable because, when my parents decided to adopt a child when I was 10, Filtrum is what I suggested that he be named. (Also, on the book cover Maggin’s middle initial is punctuated with a simple period, but he often used an exclamation point instead, which I love so much, I refuse to render it any other way.)
  5. This Shape We’re In by Jonathan Lethem – This book was lent to me by Karen Meisner after I told her how much I loved stories in which the plot is dictated by the physical shape of the setting, especially if that shape is primarily linear. My example was the movie Snowpiercer; they’re at the back of the train, they want to be at the front of the train, and all of human society stands in the way: go! I love stories like that, and Karen correctly predicted I would enjoy this, in which the characters are all living in a giant organism, and slowly make their way from the rear to the head in pursuit of goals it would be spoilery to talk too much about. But this is a short piece, probably a novella, and great fun.

Reading 2015: October

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Light month, but apparently the number of books I read is inversely proportional to how long it takes me to get this post up. As I’ve already read more books in November than I did in October (and this despite both my birthday and Fallout 4), I should be more timely for the next one.

  1. Bitch Planet, vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro – Here it is, the one I’ve been waiting for: the book of Kelly-Sue’s that fires for me on all cylinders. (And all it took was stripping out the superheroes.) This is pulpy science fiction, using the setpieces and grit of exploitation cinema to power its social commentary. It’s not satire, though; this is too deeply invested in its own characters and narrative for that word to fit. Chewy story, and art that’s evocative and garish in all the best ways. I expect I’ll be picking up all of this series.
  2. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi – There are certain authors whose prose, I find, goes down easy like water, and others whose prose bites like bourbon. That’s not a comment on the quality or artistry, nor of how much I respect the writers in question. I think the world of Ursula Le Guin, but parsing her prose isn’t effortless for me, and neither is that of Hilary Mantel or Kevin Brockmeier–all authors I adore. On the other hand, parsing Octavia Butler or Walter Tevis is like breathing, I barely notice myself doing it. Paolo Bacigalupi is in this second category for me. The structure of his sentences meshes perfectly with the cadence of my own thought, and so I blaze through his books without even noticing the time passing. There is a definite pleasure in that, which is somewhat distinct from my appreciation of the book itself. Which is all to say, I enjoyed reading this book more than I enjoyed the story. As with The Windup Girl, I liked the short fiction of which this is an expansion more than I liked the novel. In particular, this story is powered by a macguffin–some water rights documentation on old sheafs of paper–that I found unconvincing.

Reading 2015: September

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Another month of all comics. There will be novels again next month, though.

  1. More Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  2. New, Improved! Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  3. Dykes To Watch Out For The Sequel by Alison Bechdel
  4. Spawn Of Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  5. Unnatural Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  6. Hot, Throbbing Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  7. Split-Level Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  8. Post-Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  9. Dykes And Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  10. Invasion Of The Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  11. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel – This was a full reread of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip, with the exception of the non-narrative material that makes up the very first volume. Starting halfway through volume 2, the strip becomes a continuing soap opera about a group of politically aware lesbian friends that continues for over twenty years. And it isn’t temporally static, like most long-running comic strips; time passes in Dykes To Watch Out For at its actual rate. Characters age and face new challenges, children grow, pets die. It’s an astonishing document, capturing in amber two and a half decades of leftwing political trends and cultural concerns, all deftly humanized. The final book in this group, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, contains about 75% of the material in the individual collections, plus all the strips published after Invasion Of The Dykes To Watch Out For was collected and an introduction in which Bechdel draws herself musing on the notion of essentialism. If you’ve never read these strips, that’s probably the easiest way to do it.
  12. Saga, vol. 5 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples – I’m still fully enjoying and invested in the lush SF depths of Saga, though I’d be lying if I said I felt as “Ohmigod this is great!” enthusiastic about it as I did at the start. The series has settled into its rhythms, no longer shocking me with every page turn, but just humming along with perfect confidence. That’s no bad thing. I look forward to the next volume.

Reading 2015: August

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Whoops, halfway through September and I forgot to put this up.

  1. Ms. Marvel vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona – The first book of one of the most acclaimed series last year. I get the enthusiasm; this is multicultural, YA superheroism at its most delightful. I’ll probably grab another volume or two of this, and will definitely be bumping G. Willow Wilson’s novel Alif the Unseen up toward the top of my stack.
  2. Captain Marvel vol. 2: Down by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Christopher Sebela, Dexter Soy, and Filipe Andrade – This book is richly written and structurally interesting–especially the issue shaped around Carol Danvers’s continually morphing to-do list–but I think I enjoyed it less than the previous one. That’s because it’s more tightly integrated with Marvel continuity and characters, and as a DC kid, I just don’t know who these people are. Too frequently I felt like the folks in the theater at the end of The Avengers, asking, “…so who was that purple guy?” This was especially true of the antagonists in the collection’s second story arc.
  3. This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki – What a gorgeous book. An achingly deep slice of adolescence, tender without being sentimental. I’ll be rereading this one.
  4. Miracleman Book 2: The Red King Syndrome by Alan Moore and Alan Davis
  5. Miracleman Book 3: Olympus by Alan Moore and John Totleben – I’d been waiting years to read these books in print. I found scans in the late 2000s of the second half of Alan Moore’s run on Miracleman (starting about halfway through book 2 here), which I had only ever heard written of as a lost masterpiece. Even back then, without getting to follow the story from the beginning, I thought Olympus matched the hype. To have the complete story on my shelves in glossy hardback feels like getting to make good on a promise to my younger self.

Reading 2015: July

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Hard month. Here’s what I read.

  1. Pluto vol. 1 by Naoki Urasawa
  2. Pluto vol. 2 by Naoki Urasawa – These two were lent my by Janalyn Guo. It’s a science fiction manga, a murder mystery set in a future populated by both humans and robots, some of which have human-level AI. It’s also a reimagining of an Astro Boy story by Osamu Tezuka. I’ve never read any Tezuka; he’s an author I’ve long intended to binge on, but just never gotten around to. So reading these was enjoyable, but I was constantly feeling they were relying on allusive plot points and images which were lost on me. For example, the ending notes of both volumes are introductions of new characters whose design and name are clearly intended to thunder with recognition of their famous antecedents. As I’m not familiar with the source material, the effect didn’t land. But I’m still finding the story interesting, and will likely read more.
  3. The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson – Naomi was a classmate at Iowa, and having read many pieces of her short fiction I was excited for her debut novel. It’s a story of four women–two sisters from Brooklyn, their grandmother, and their mother–over a summer in Barbados when the relationships between all four oscillate, solidify, shatter. The book is written in a fluid POV that illustrates each facet of the characters’ shared emotional experience so that the reader has access to the whole, just as perpendicular shadows, though flat, can reveal a three-dimensional shape. It’s a very effective technique, pulled off with a sure and sympathetic hand. Naomi’s writing is evocative throughout, and frequently piercing, as in this passage that I particularly loved.
  4. Vox by Nicholson Baker – I get why people like this book. It’s a novel all in dialogue between two strangers on a sex chat line; a structurally interesting exercise in playfully obsessive eroticism. I understand why sexy fiction pursued with a joyous, intellectual abandon is attractive to people. But as with House of Holes, I had to struggle to finish this. It’s one-note, and once I’d grasped the algorithm of its experimentation, I just got bored. While it’s laudably enthusiastic and uninhibited, I found the book neither arousing nor surprising, and so had little to keep me invested. Baker’s fiction may just not be for me.

Reading 2015: June

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This was the month that I accepted I am not going to hit 100 books this year. Some of that was my continued travel, some of that was an increased work load. But the biggest part? The announcement that Fallout 4 will be released in November, on my birthday. That pretty much guarantees I won’t be reading many books in November. I’m already far enough behind that skipping a whole month makes the goal impossible. I’m still going to try to beat last year’s mark of 73, though. But I didn’t make good progress in June, reading only one novel and two graphic novels. I started several other books last month, but haven’t finished them yet. Hopefully that prefigures a much higher count for July.

  1. The Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace – I picked this up at WisCon on the strength of a recommendation from Delia Sherman and my general faith in Small Beer Press. It’s published through their YA imprint Big Mouth House, about which more later. This is the story of a young woman in a brutal but magic-rich post-apocalyptic world who teams up with the ghost of a supersoldier from the distant pre-apocalyptic past to correct an ancient injustice. The plot is frenetic, and I found it difficult to put down, even as I suspect that the sheer pace of events is letting the narrative get away with less justification for its worldbuilding than I would normally require. The scenes whip by fast enough, and are exciting enough, that I didn’t stop long to worry that I can’t come up with any theories about how the world-that-was could have turned into the world-that-is, or why the afterlife functions as it does. Which I guess is a way of saying that one of this novel’s strengths is its confidence. Really, the only thing that bothered me while I was reading was that this book is positioned as YA. I’m on record as thinking the only requirement for a YA novel is a young protagonist, and canonically Wasp is sixteen years old. But we don’t learn her age until close to the middle of the story, and I had been reading her as much older. Even after learning she was sixteen, she seemed more like a character in her early to mid twenties to me.
  2. Super Mutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki – My graphic novel collection (and likely comics pubishing as a whole) is so brutally canted toward male creators that every few weeks I stop into my local comic shop and specifically ask what new books they have that are (1) written by women and (2) not about superheroes. This book was a find from my last such trip. It’s primarily a collection of single page gag strips featuring a recurring cast of high school students who just happen to be wizards and mutants and creatures out of myth. The humor ranges from darkly cynical to absurd, and in the last twenty or thirty pages an actual plot begins to coalesce out of nowhere. A fun, fast read.
  3. Vattu: The Name and the Mark by Evan Dahm – I’ve been a fan of his work since he was first serializing Rice Boy, but haven’t kept up with his material online. As he writes sprawling, surrealist fantasy epics, I prefer to consume his work in big chunks. Vattu, the slowest-paced of the Overside stories I’ve yet read, was served well by this practice. This is only the first volume of a tale about people looking for identity after being displaced from their cultures by a colonizing empire. Dahm’s color and line work, which started out great, have become sublime. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this. (Also notable for other Rice Boy fans: he’s currently doing a commentary-laden rerun of that story.)

Reading 2015: May

I got in a bicycle accident early in May and broke my wrist, so was unable to type for about a week and a half. This took a bite out of my work schedule, which I filled with, yes, more TV, but also more reading.

  1. I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura – An enjoyable graphic novel that was similar in many ways to Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. A creature out of myth intercedes in the life of a child who is trying and failing to deal with the serious illness of her mother. In this case the monster is a titan rather than the Green Man, and the relationship is for the most part adversarial rather than didactic, but thematically the two books have a great deal of overlap. I’m glad I read A Monster Calls first, as it’s the more emotionally complex work, doing deep explorations of things about survivor guilt that I Kill Giants only superficially touches. But it’s possible that whichever of these two one reads second will suffer due to familiarity with the shared narrative beats.
  2. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel – This graphic novel, meanwhile, isn’t superficial about anything. In many ways a sequel to Fun Home, this purports to be about Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, but more about using the concept of maternal relationships as a lens to look at memoir and neurosis. It struck me as a less focused book than Fun Home, but a trip through Bechdel’s expansive, unflinching intellect is so inherently interesting that the experience doesn’t much suffer for being less structured. It did make me want to go back and read Fun Home again, though.
  3. The Color of Money by Walter Tevis – This was the last Tevis novel I’d not yet read. (There should be a word for the bittersweet feeling of finishing the last unread book by a favorite, deceased author.) It’s a decades-later sequel to his first novel, The Hustler, and while it’s not my favorite of his novels, I found Tevis’s writing as gripping as ever. My main complaint about this book is that too much of it seemed to recapitulate emotional gestures from The Hustler and plot gestures from The Queens Gambit, both of which I’d judge to be superior works. But there was a moment I found really touching, one that only this book could do. There’s an important scene early in The Hustler where Fast Eddie’s opponent, Minnesota Fats, disappears into a bathroom and then emerges, composed, having washed his hands and face. Though Tevis never points at the callback, there’s a moment near the end of The Color of Money where Fast Eddie does this same thing, and for readers who’ve read both books the parallelism is profound.
  4. Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill – Gaitskill has sort of snuck up on me, slowly and quietly becoming one of my favorite authors. She’s one of the least sentimental writers I’ve encountered, but she creates emotional landscapes that are as solid as her physical settings. I first came to her work years ago after seeing the movie “Secretary,” and wanting to read it’s presumably pro-BDSM source material. What I found was much darker, more complicated, and personal than the movie had led me to expect. In Gaitskill’s writing I run into aching blends of disappointment and desire that are deeply recognizable, supported by sentences I never would have written. Her work captures facets of my lived emotional experience using a technology of images I don’t yet understand. This book, though it didn’t grab me as much as her second novel Veronica, wasn’t an exception. It’s about two women, Dorothy Never and Justine Shade, of different age, class, body shape, and worldview, but similarly traumatized by early life experience. They meet when Justine interviews Dorothy about her involvement with a thinly veiled Ayn Rand and Objectivist movement. It’s got some structural formality as well, with Dorothy’s sections in first person and Justine’s in third. This formality was a little bit of a stumbling block for me initially, for no reason than it made the book easier to put down at chapter transitions. But by the end the POVs are switching so fast and with such narrative momentum that I was hooked, and consumed the third section of the book in a compulsive gulp.
  5. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks – I’ve read nearly all of Banks’s science fiction, but this was my first of his realist novels. (I’m sticking with the “Iain M. Banks” tag since it’s the same person, even though he left off the middle initial for these books.) Calling it “realist” seems only barely appropriate. Though nothing in this novel is impossible, it’s improbable as all hell. The viewpoint character is a sociopathic young man, a former murderer and practitioner of sympathetic magic, in what turns out to be a whole family of mentally damaged individuals. In some ways it struck me, especially in the beginning, as a sort of adolescent version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The POV is interesting enough and the macabre violence colorful enough that I was pulled enjoyably through the book, but–and here’s where the SPOILERS start–the final twist seemed like something of a pointless gotcha. The openly misogynist main character who believes himself to have lost his genitalia in a childhood accident turns out to actually be a biological female whose father has been secretly dosing with testosterone since childhood. This is revealed only a few pages from the end, and never narratively problematized. It’s a fireworks show of imaginative voice and depravity, but didn’t in the end seem to mean very much.
  6. The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman – I met Stephanie at ICFA this year, where she was awarded the Crawford award for this novel. Now that I’ve read it, I think the win well deserved. It’s an intrusive urban fantasy story grounded in Jewish mysticism and structured like a mystery novel. Marjorie, who at the start of the book isn’t even aware of her Jewish heritage, discovers after her grandfather dies that all the fairy tales he told her as a child were true. She has to find lost documents and rediscover ancient knowledge to try to save her sister’s newborn son, sometimes opposed by her ultra-orthodox brother-in-law. My favorite parts of the book though are the four long, beautiful passages written with cadence of folklore. Also, as I have a somewhat uneasy relationship with my own Judaism, this narrative was embedded in a point of view that I found, tonally, very recognizable.
  7. Collected Fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi – I loved his debut novel The Quantum Thief so much that, barring a major disappointment, I’ll give anything he publishes a read. This is a somewhat disjoint short story collection, mixing near future SF, posthuman SF, ghost stories, folkloric fantasy, and some stranger things. My favorite pieces were “The Jugaad Cathedral,” the SF piece in this book that most successfully combined his typical technological fireworks with human interest, “Fisher of Men,” a fun outsmart-the-mythical-creature fantasy story, and “Skywalker of Earth,” which is a string theory pulp pastiche that is tonally unlike anything else I’ve read. The closest is probably some parts of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, but that lacks the hard science space operatics. Great fun. (Also, it seems that Rajaniemi’s third novel, The Causal Angel, came out while my life was topsy-turvy last year and I managed to miss it. Need to pick that up.)

Reading 2015: April

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As predicted, I fell way behind on my reading goals in April. This was because I spent way more time watching television than I did in books. I’ve sold an option on the television rights for “The New Mother” to Plan B Entertainment, and since then have been giving myself a crash course in narrative tools that work on the screen, on the off chance I get to do some TV writing. Good news for me, bad news for my new year’s resolution. Perhaps I can catch back up over the months to come, though balancing writing time and reading time is a zero-sum game.

  1. Persona by Genevieve Valentine – Whereas her last novel was a fairytale retelling, Genevieve’s newest is a psychological action thriller about fashion, expectation, and international politics. Reading this, it occurred to me that Geneveive is sort of reclaiming the Heinleinian Competent Man archetype. She is writing Competent Women, whose superhuman adroitness isn’t grounded in the technical, but the interpersonal. The national Faces of Persona are people–mostly women–who can size up situations instantly, piece out the hidden motives behind every smile, and spin intricate strategy on the fly. Within their areas of expertise, these people are basically Batman. Persona made me even more excited to eventually read Genevieve’s ongoing run on Catwoman, and I look forward to the sequel that the end of this novel strongly implies.
  2. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark – When I realized how badly I was going to fall behind schedule this month I decided to solicit a list of people’s favorite short books by women. I have no shortage of volumes of all different lengths by men on my shelves, but my selection of women’s work is narrower. (Hence the gender parity project.) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was the most widely recommended book I didn’t already own. I thought it very good, but perhaps enjoyed it less than some of those who recommended it to me. Many of the folks I’ve told I was reading this have exclaimed, “Oh, I love The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie!” I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I thought it was psychologically incisive and structurally clever, using repetition in a manner similar to Catch-22, where scenes and exchanges recur verbatim but with ramifying meaning each time. But it is still my impression that it didn’t touch me as deeply as it has many. Do you love this book? I’d like to know what you love about it.
  3. Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan –A slim collection that I nonetheless took a long time to finish. My favorite story in here was “Monkey’s Paternoster,” a tale from the point of view of a monkey at an Indian temple as the group’s patriarch dies and is violently replaced. I also liked “Forever Upward,” in which a young girl rediscovers the techniques for speaking to old gods, gods that have been displaced by those of a colonizing group. Many of the others, though, I thought forgettable. Lanagan writes dark-toned, thick-voiced tales that explore their speculative premises from deeply embedded point of view. When all the elements are working the result is unforgettable–stories like “Singing my Sister Down” and “An Honest Day’s Work.” But other times her stories strike me more as B-sides or exercises. Never bad, but not memorably compelling. This collection had more of the latter than the former.
  4. The Lagoon by Lilli Carré –A lyric graphic novel with thick black art that reminded me at times of a less photorealistic Charles Burns. Three generations of a family live next to a lagoon where a creature lives and sings haunting songs. All three have vague relationships of sorts with the creature. Symbols and images stack atop one another, but don’t seem to add up to much. If there is a coherent metaphorical framework under this narrative, it was too deeply buried for me to find it. If someone wanted to propose a reading of what this story meant I’m sure I could be persuaded that they were right. But I enjoyed this only as a gnomic dreamscape, and my feeling is that finding coherent meaning in The Lagoon would take more effort than can be reasonably asked of a reader.

Reading 2015: Interruption

It’s looking like this is going to be the month I fall behind on my reading resolution.  This is mostly due to good things; I’ll have news I’m ready to announce more widely soon that has me spending more time away from my library. I hope I’m able to take some time to make it up later, but I’ll be surprised if I manage eight books in April. (If you wanted to recommend some wonderful but short books for me to check out, especially ones written by women, that could be helpful.)

UPDATE: All the recommendations I got are here.

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