An academic I’m on a panel with in a few weeks (talking about Medievalism) just asked for suggestions of fantasy novels for undergraduate teaching of genre. I had some suggestions, as did a number of other people. The most suggested novel was The Witcher, which is, technically science fiction, not fantasy. I was told this by a group of upset Polish fans when I described it as fantasy in a talk I gave them. Some lessons are taught through error: when I looked more closely, the fans were quite right and I was wrong. The style of the novels and many of the themes are fantasy, but the built world is a future planet-linked-to-Earth-in-strange-ways.
The Witcher could be taught as a fantasy novel, but I suspect the teacher would have to explain that the world building uses humans from our world plus strange SFnal crossovers. We agreed (the fans and I) that it could be mistaken for fantasy because it has quite a few traits that are more fantastical and science fictional. So I was wrong, but forgiven because it was an understandable error from someone who didn’t know the world very well.
All this got me wondering: what novel would you suggest?
If you were giving a 20-year-old just one fantasy novel (and not a long one, so no Gene Wolfe and no Lord of the Rings, and certainly no Game of Thrones) to get them thinking and fascinated, what novel would you give them? And if you were to give them five they needed to read to really get the hang of fantasy novels, what five would you choose? They don’t need to be well-known novels. They need to be perfect to lure the student into learning.
This is an excuse to find out about really good novels that miss being seen. I plan to read all those you suggest that I have not already read, of course.
I have never been a fan of The Great Gatsby, considering it incredibly overrated. Fitzgerald wrote lovely sentences, but he and the others of his era (most notably Hemingway) who were competing – in their own little circles – to see who could write The Great American Novel were not nearly as important and influential as they and some English teachers like to proclaim.
I’ve always thought that, in rating male American writers of the first half of the 20th Century, neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway could hold a candle to Dashiell Hammett. And if there is a Great American Novel, it’s Beloved, by Toni Morrison.
But there is some value in Gatsby, as the recent Gatsby-themed party thrown by the grifter currently occupying our White House makes clear. Anyone who has read the book would consider holding that event particularly tone-deaf, particularly when the party was scheduled for the day that SNAP benefits were running out.
I have read the book, twice in fact. Once when I was young and again about a dozen years ago when it was being raved about once again by the literati on the occasion of it entering the public domain. I wasn’t impressed either time by the book, though I deplored the culture it described in both cases.
Many of the reports on the party – and not a few people on social media – have quoted one of the great lines from the book:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
It is a wonderful sentence and a true indictment of many of the wealthy people in the United States, not just those who, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, came from relatively old money, but also the newly minted oligarchs we see today.
It’s not a surprise that the author of the book about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg called it Careless People. We have a lot of those in positions of power these days.
But nobody is talking much about Jay Gatsby himself. Gatsby is putting on a great show, but he is a criminal, a true thug. He came from nothing and stole his way to wealth and almost to respectability. He was not careless, at least not until the end when he saw he was not going to get everything he wanted and threw it all away. Continue reading “The Problem With The Great Gatsby“…
As energy use rises and the planet warms, you might have dreamed of an energy source that works 24/7, rain or shine, quietly powering homes, industries and even entire cities without the ups and downs of solar or wind – and with little contribution to climate change.
The promise of new engineering techniques for geothermal energy – heat from the Earth itself – has attracted rising levels of investment to this reliable, low-emission power source that can provide continuous electricity almost anywhere on the planet. That includes ways to harness geothermal energy from idle or abandoned oil and gas wells. In the first quarter of 2025, North American geothermal installations attracted US$1.7 billion in public funding – compared with $2 billion for all of 2024, which itself was a significant increase from previous years, according to an industry analysis from consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
As an exploration geophysicist and energy engineer, I’ve studied geothermal systems’ resource potential and operational trade-offs firsthand. From the investment and technological advances I’m seeing, I believe geothermal energy is poised to become a significant contributor to the energy mix in the U.S. and around the world, especially when integrated with other renewable sources.
A May 2025 assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey found that geothermal sources just in the Great Basin, a region that encompasses Nevada and parts of neighboring states, have the potential to meet as much as 10% of the electricity demand of the whole nation – and even more as technology to harness geothermal energy advances. And the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, geothermal energy could provide as much as 15% of the world’s electricity needs.
For generations, Maori people in New Zealand, and other people elsewhere around the world, have made use of the Earth’s heat, as in hot springs, where these people are cooking food in the hot water. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Why geothermal energy is unique
Geothermal energy taps into heat beneath the Earth’s surface to generate electricity or provide direct heating. Unlike solar or wind, it never stops. It runs around the clock, providing consistent, reliable power with closed-loop water systems and few emissions.
Geothermal is capable of providing significant quantities of energy. For instance, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project in Utah is reportedly on track to deliver 100 megawatts of baseload, carbon-free geothermal power by 2026. That’s less than the amount of power generated by the average coal plant in the U.S., but more than the average natural gas plant produces.
There are several ways to get energy from deep within the Earth.
Hydrothermal systems tap into underground hot water and steam to generate electricity. These resources are concentrated in geologically active areas where heat, water and permeable rock naturally coincide. In the U.S., that’s generally California, Nevada and Utah. Internationally, most hydrothermal energy is in Iceland and the Philippines.
A drilling rig sits outside a home in White Plains, N.Y., where a geothermal heat pump is being installed. AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson
Enhanced geothermal systems effectively create electricity-generating hydrothermal processes just about anywhere on the planet. In places where there is not enough water in the ground or where the rock is too dense to move heat naturally, these installations drill deep holes and inject fluid into the hot rocks, creating new fractures and opening existing ones, much like hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas production.
A system like this uses more than one well. In one, it pumps cold water down, which collects heat from the rocks and then is pumped back up through another well, where the heat drives turbines. In recent years, academic and corporate research has dramatically improved drilling speed and lowered costs.
Ground source heat pumps do not require drilling holes as deep, but instead take advantage of the fact that the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable just below the surface, even just 6 or8 feet down (1.8 to 2.4 meters) – and it’s hotter hundreds of feet lower.
These systems don’t generate electricity but rather circulate fluid in underground pipes, exchanging heat with the soil, extracting warmth from the ground in winter and transferring warmth to the ground in summer. These systems are similar but more efficient thanair-source heat pumps, sometimes called minisplits, which are becoming widespread across the U.S. for heating and cooling. Geothermal heat pump systems can serve individual homes, commercial buildings and even neighborhood or business developments.
Enhanced geothermal systems can be built almost anywhere and can take advantage of existing wells to save the time and money of drilling new holes deep into the ground. U.S. Geological Survey
And converting abandoned oil and gas wells for enhanced geothermal systems could significantly increase the amount of energy available and its geographic spread.
Those projects include repurposing idle oil or gas wells, which is relatively straightforward: Engineers identify wells that reach deep, hot rock formations and circulate water or another fluid in a closed loop to capture heat to generate electricity or provide direct heating. This method does not require drilling new wells, which significantly reduces setup costs and environmental disruption and accelerates deployment.
Despite its challenges, geothermal energy’s reliability, low emissions and scalability make it a vital complement to solar and wind – and a cornerstone of a stable, low-carbon energy future.
I am late, even for the US timezones. It’s still Monday in Hawaii, though, so I shall consider this post not too late. My reason is one that I find hilarious, every single time it happens. The US has elections the first Tuesday in November… Australia has a horse race. I usually write my posts for US time, which means often it’s Tuesday my time and today… I forgot. Last night I knew I had to write it, but things happened last night and I went to bed thinking “What haven’t I done?” And then I ate strawberries and cherries and chocolate with friends, as I do every year and turned home and made dinner and then realised I had nearly missed Monday. The cherries are important, because they are new season’s, just in time for the first time we normally eat them, which is the first Tuesday in November.
This fits with my current thoughts. I’m trying to work out why, right now, so many of us do not see the lives of others. We place our own life or our own assumptions about their lives onto the life we think they have. This does not actually help get rid of the really nasty bigotry I see in the world. I need to think more about the paths we walk and how to remember to look over and see and respectfully appreciate the paths of others. When I do, I may post about it. What I want to do is write a book, but the reason I keep being late and forgetting time is ME/CFS and I’m rather lucky I finished both my thesis and the last book before my current relapse, because it’s more severe than it’s been for a while. I can do more than I thought, but writing a whole new book from scratch is currently not possible.
What is even more fun than being publicly Jewish in a country that is lapsing into extreme racism? Being publicly Jewish with chronic fatigue.
Expect some of this to appear in my next novel… when the fatigue is sufficiently diminished to finish it. My brain is working on it even when my body can’t, so that piece of writing is still happening, just not on paper yet.
Since most of you who read this blog are from the US, I want to wish you the very best with your Tuesday elections. Every Melbourne Cup I want to talk about how elections and horse races are so similar and yet so different, but not this year. This year you have enough to deal with. You do not need additional bad jokes. Good luck!
I keep seeing memes go by on social media that list changes we need to make once we get the fascists out of office. There are some good items on those lists and the people sharing them have good intentions, but at least two of the items drive me nuts: term limits for the Supreme Court and ending the electoral college.
It’s not that I disagree with those ideas – the electoral college should have been tossed out long ago and while I’m generally skeptical about term limits the lengths suggested are reasonable – but rather that they aren’t going to happen.
The Constitution provides for appointment for life for Supreme Court justices (and all federal judges) and it also sets up the electoral college. To get rid of those things, you need a constitutional amendment.
Getting a constitutional amendment is hard and in the current political climate probably impossible even if we throw all the bastards out in 2028.
However, there are things we can do that do not require amending the Constitution, and one of them would do a much better job of fixing the current disaster of the supreme court than term limits.
We need to expand the court.
There is no limit on the size of the court in the Constitution. The size of the court was set at nine members – eight associate justices and a chief justice – in 1869. At the time, the population of the United States was about 39 million, or roughly 10 percent of what it is now.
We actually need a larger court to get to all the issues the Supreme Court should handle. We need more judges on the federal district courts and the courts of appeal as well.
Further, term limits wouldn’t even apply to the current judges we need to get rid of, because any amendment would likely exempt them. We need to change the Supreme Court immediately and expansion would do that. Continue reading “The Changes We Need”…
It’s National Cat Day. I’m not sure whose idea this is — people seem to invent holidays on a regular basis — but that does seem like a good day for promoting two charity anthologies edited by Danielle Ackley-McPhail and published by eSpec Books: A Future for Ferals and More Futures for Ferals.
Both these books were published for the purpose of raising money for A Future for Ferals Cat Rescue. If you buy from the eSpec site, three times as much money goes to the cat rescue, since they don’t have to pay a cut to third-party sellers.
I’ve got stories in each book — mine are cat mysteries I wrote 20-odd years ago and are reprints — and other authors include Sharon Lee, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Lawrence M. Schoen, and many other people who often write for eSpec or contribute to their anthologies. All, of course, are cat lovers who were glad to donate stories.
There are both print and ebook editions, and all profits go to the rescue. Get some good stories and help some cats today!.
Some weeks the world is so full of pain that it’s difficult to write something small and sensible.
I used to deal with such things by inviting friends to dinner. I love cooking and chatting and it was the perfect solution. In Australia right now, it’s only the perfect solution for someone who is close within the Jewish community. I am not this person, although I sued to be. That’s another story.
So many of my friends say “Sorry, too busy,” or “Next time.” Add that to my illnesses arguing with each other (a squabbling family, with no respect for their physical host) and I need a different way through. My US friends are often dealing with much worse – Australia’s antisemitism might be pretty cruel, but as long as I don’t go out much, it’s safe, and Albo is not good news but compared with the US President, he’s goodness personified. I’m caught in a strange little bind.
A friend explained that this whole thing felt pretty much like the first two years of COVID. That was my breakthrough moment. My illnesses meant that I saw no-one during COVID unless they were delivering things. Compared with that first two years, I live in a whirligig and leave my flat once a week, sometimes twice! I have friends online. And, the biggest thing of all… my TV works. During COVID I watched all the Stargate TV. I muttered when the history was so badly off. I wanted to know what Daniel Jackson’s PhDs were in and how they gave him such an ill-balanced understanding of history.
One of my many bugbears with the show was that it would have been nice to have at least maybe one or two Jews in the ancient Middle East. Stargate helped me see where some bigots get their bigotry from. If all they know about ancient history was first presented to them by Stargate or something like it, then they do not see our world, but a fictional universe.
And I’m off-topic. I was going to talk about how that COVID suggestion led to me watching much Star Trek. When I can do all my regular work, I watch less. When isolation pushes me towards cliff edges, I watch more. I argue about the world building with myself, and use the stories to help understand why we got where we are.
I always used to do this, but I’d watch or read whatever it was my writing and history students needed to know and find ways through popular TV to get them to analyse. I so miss that. But locally, no-one wants me to teach or talk anymore. This means that the thing I do best – help people understand the cultural and social basis of their own decisions – is one of the things lost unto me because I’m too Jewish and not physically robust.
The other day I emerged from hiding a little and asked people if they had more sources for what’s happening in Israel/Gaza so that I could balance out what I was learning. The main critical sources I have access to are all from pro-Israel analysts. I can (and do) pull them apart and make sense of them, but I’ve not been able to find anything nearly as solid in the analysis of data from anywhere else. Instead of giving me more sources, so that I could balance when I knew and be fair in how I see things… I lost friends. I don’t know what they saw and why my request was so impossible (they didn’t tell me), but from my end I was using my teaching methods on myself. I asked for more sources so that I could compare language and belief, look for patterns of speech, check where terms come from and how they’re used, and, above everything, when people claim this or that, drill down and find the source of the numbers and the origins of the claims, and pull them to pieces and balance them with views from other places and in other languages. Add to this checking the path ideas travel, for instance, find a translation of an article in Al Jazeera in Arabic and then compare it with the English version.
From my perspetive, anyone who makes claims about happenings at the other side of the world without doing this is doing what writers do when we world build lazily. When we world build lazily, we draw on our preconceptions of a place and time or a type of book and build up from there. This is why there is a shortage of ancient Jews in Stargate. And it’s why I’ve been accused (personally) of genocide and other things.
I can deal with the illnesses, even though they have entirely changed my everyday. I cannot deal nearly as well with people who are bright, yet will not question and try to understand how things happen, and who blame me for their own lack of thought.
I could have just said at the start of this post, “Oh, how I miss teaching!” but the reason I miss teaching is fairly important. These things are, I admit, difficult. My Richard III class at the Australian National University was both loved and hated . I got hold of such a range of primary sources for the last 3 years of his life, and the whole course comprised of students learning about the nature of the sources and pulling them apart, and then crating their own arguments on whether Richard was good, bad, a demon, a human being… whatever they wanted… as long as they could convince the rest of the class. It was an extension class, so the only result they had was their fellow students’ approval. The class felt that there wasn’t enough class time, so adjourned to coffee or dinner nearby and argued for two more hours. This is the polar opposite of conversations that cannot ever happen.
While there are things we need to hurry up and deal with – climate change and fascism spring to mind – the efforts to address both those areas seem to be plodding along. Meanwhile, the broligarchs are trumpeting what they’re calling AI and claiming that their concept of the future – one built on bad reading of “Golden Age” science fiction – is just a few years away.
Their ideas range from living on Mars in the next five (ten? twenty? thirty?) years to destroying the Earth so we can live throughout the Universe by the trillions, which I assume they think will happen in their lifetimes, though perhaps only if the singularity happens or some other form of immortality comes along to give them (but probably not the rest of us) infinite time.
It’s easy to poke holes in their lack of knowledge of any area except computer programming (and maybe even that). Even their physics seems wonky and as for their biology – well, let’s be real: we humans evolved on and with this planet. There is no place else in the Universe where we will fit as well. Destroying the Earth is taking away our perfect home.
It may be possible for us to live on other planets or in orbiting satellites, but there are a lot of challenges to that, challenges rooted in our biology and in physics in general, not to mention in the fact that we really know so damn little. There’s so much more we need to understand before we set out to colonize the universe, perhaps starting with whether we should be colonizing anything at all.
I wrote a novel about that: The Weave, which is about humans finding a habitable planet with an asteroid belt chock full of useful elements, a planet that turns out to be inhabited by intelligent beings who do not have human levels of technology, but have something else. I was thinking about the conquistadors in the Americas when I wrote it – the working title was Seven Cities of Gold and there are names and jokes on that theme throughout.
It is science fiction, meaning it is a thought experiment about how humans should approach meeting other intelligent beings, especially given some of the disasters in our history of meeting each other here on Earth. I’ll just note that the Earth I imagined was not destroyed to make this exploration possible, though it was far from a perfect society.
Biology. Physics. Ethics. Just a few of the things we have to consider as we explore beyond our planet or, for that matter, build future systems here on Earth.
There’s no need to be in a hurry about space exploration.
We have a perfectly good planet to live on – even with the challenges presented by our lack of attention to climate change – and, in fact, we could and should spend a lot of time and effort making sure we keep it livable for all and improve the infrastructure that makes a good modern life possible without destroying the core systems that make any kind of life possible.
It would make sense to get a properly balanced system working on Earth before we try to live anywhere else, because by doing that we’d figure out exactly what is necessary. Continue reading “Slow Down and Build Good Futures”…
I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.
For eight years I was the Operations Manager at the American Bookbinders Museum. In practice, this title included a bunch of functions including Design Department, Chief Docent, Rental Manager, and Covid Czar–but the important thing is that I learned to look at the objects which had been, for my entire life, vessels for story. Looking at this book (which is a decommissioned library book with WITHDRAWN stamped on the inside cover, still in its mylar jacket cover) it’s… elderly. Probably the same vintage as many of the books I took out of the library when I was a teenager: full “adult size” books from the Adult section of the library (this one is the 6″x9″ trim associated with the top of the publisher’s list–what the publisher believes will be important and sell well, as Brede did). And it swivels a little because the binding has loosened over the years.
Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (Here’s a good description of the anatomy of a sewn book, from the Princeton Public Library). The structure of a book is meant to keep all the pages together in the correct order, safely. Sewing signatures (or gathers) into a larger text block, was the way this was done for a thousand years. Most sewn books have a hollow spine (which is to say, the sewn spine is flexible, and the spine cover “floats” above it to protect the spine without making the structure more rigid. Then came the paperback, where the pages are glued together in a block. This has some serious benefits, but paperbacks are ephemeral. Granted, I still have paperbacks I stole borrowed from my parents that were published in the 1950s, but most paperbacks were not expected to live very long. Their structure did not hold up (when I worked in Production at Tor Books we would get letters calling us uncomplimentary things because eventually the spines of really thick paperbacks would begin to split or separate–this was a function of the process and the glues then available).
Then, in the mid-late 1990s, the technology changed. The glue used in “perfect” binding (that’s what paperback bindings are called in the trade) improved hugely. Wonder why trade paperbacks suddenly went from being a rarity to being a dominant format? It’s because suddenly you could do a trade-sized book at a price that was much more buyer-friendly, without the fear that the latest Big Horror (or Fantasy or Biography) Book would fall apart while you’re reading it.
So picking up In This House of Brede and really looking at it was a bit of a time capsule for me. The original purpose of books–all books–was as a container for information. Vessels, as I said above. You wanted to protect the information and keep it organized so that you can move back and forth as needed (the codex form on which the modern book is based makes that easier than the earlier format, the scroll). And you wanted to be able to keep that protected information out of the hands of the people you didn’t want to have it, whether because it would give them an advantage, or because you didn’t think they were worthy of it. The information in those books–whether it was an epic poem or a history or an alchemical formulary–had value. By the time this particular book was published, the point was not to keep this story or any other out of the public hands–it was to make it widely, broadly, lucratively available. The shift in binding technology helped with that. (But I can still pick up this book and sniff it and be transported back to 14-year-old me at the library.)
There’s a lot of agitation in certain quarters about keeping information out of the hands of… oh, children, or innocents, or people who think. Everyone. I’m hoping that technology–the genie that’s been let out of the bottle–will make that impossible in the long run. Fingers crossed.
__________ * I have, for all my total lack of religious background, a fascination with monastic practice and life. Don’t ask me why.
Today I’m thinking about how we allocate meaning to objects. This is not a great theoretical thing. Specifically, I’m thinking that most writers I know will say “My character needs a drink” and allocate something to drink from. That something fits the world of their novel. If the character (let’s call them ‘Fred’) drinks ale, they may use a tankard. If Fred drinks wine, then a wine glass. Whatever they drink from tends to reflect the society they’re in. If Fred is on a space station, drinking something terribly celebratory and ancient, then Fred might gingerly unwrap the ancient wineglass, stop to admire it and to consider their five times great-grandmother who owned it in the 1950s and sip ordinary wine from it. The wine takes on attributes because of the vessel it’s drunk from.
From the author’s view, then, mostly it’s easy. What is Fred’s culture? When and where does Fred live? What important information does the drinking vessel communicate? Does the reader need to know that Fred’s wine drinking habit goes back nearly two hundred years, or does he just need to assuage his thirst? We write – in an ideal world – what we need the reader to see.
When I see a vessel as historical because it’s in a museum display case, I do what the reader does. I will check the card describing its origin and where it was found and then insert myself into its history. I am the reader. The person who wrote that card (‘Sheila’) gives it the context a writer does. Before Sheila, that glass had a quite different life. If Sheila chooses it to illuminate life in the Middle Ages and the glass is from the twentieth century (like Fred’s) then we have a clear and present misinterpretation. Even if the date and place are entirely correct, however, we’re liable to misinterpret. (and this next bit is a description of an actual exhibit in a very real museum) For instance, what if Sheila includes the glass as an example of daily life in an exhibition about the people of a specific city from the Middle Ages to about 1700? Obviously, she’s telling us that the epople in the city used glasses like this. And if the exhibition only showed Christian spiritual objects for the most part, she’s insinuating that religious Christianity is the main drive of life in that city.
But what if, historically, that glass was owned by someone Jewish? That focus on Christian religious iconography and that small space for everyday life implies otherwise unless she notes on the card “Most of this exhibition plays no part in the religious life of 20% of the inhabitants of those town. This glass was owned by one of those 20%.” That card might still be drowned out by the many rooms of religious art, but at least that one object points out that, just because most people thought this thing doesn’t mean that everyone did. It also helps people see that we attribute meaning to an object. That glass might be on my mother’s dinner table or lost in space, but ti’s still capable of being drunk from by quite different people. We allocate meaning. When we’re bigots, we allocate meanings that exclude or that even hate.
What does this mean for novels? Fred’s glass might belong somewhere different entirely. We only know what the novelist tells us. And if it’s an historical novel set in a place with a significant Muslim or Jewish community (say, a particular part of London, right now) and there is no indication of that in any of 200 noels by 150 writers, then when we read about Fred, we leave out actual people from actual places and times.
When most of the people who talk about Jews without checking our history, who talk over Jews, who tells us the world would be better if we were invisible, read novels, their view that Jews don’t have a history and should not have voices is confirmed. If someone Jewish then walks down the street and the reader sees them, they’re seen as exotic. That wine glass has helped remind the reader that Jews are exotic and alien.
If Fred is a woman and we use the world built by the people who wrote the 1960s (original) version of Star Trek, then the glass would be held by someone very feminine and with little agency. Even the most senior woman on the Enterprise is scripted as having little agency. That glass reminds us that she’s not permitted to serve herself wine, nor to break the glass and use the sharp shards to save the lives of everyone on board the ship.
In our lives, objects are not neutral. We assign meaning to them. Story matters, because story gives us that meaning. If 200 books with a setting where Jews lived do not contain Jewish characters then it’s worth looking for books that do. When women lack agency and plot points don’t hinge on them, find books where women matter. This applies to so many of us. We all tend to accept that novels and TV and film are about certain types of people only, that gender and size, and skin colour, and shape, and religion, and class, and agency, and even shoe size are all pretty standard.
However, that wine glass in that exhibition is never culturally neutral. Nor is our reading. When we ourselves walk down that street, we carry all this with us. We use it to navigate how we talk to people and what we talk about and how we judge them and what place in our lives we assign to them. Right now, Judaism is part of my awareness partly because I’m assigned to being outside the lives of many people I once knew, because one does seldom invites Jews to dinner or to walk in the park right now. My relationship to that wine glass has, then, been shattered entirely. My once-friends’ relationship with the glass has also been changed: no-one Jewish drinks out of any glass at their dinners.
Every single one of my novels asks about what baggage we carry in some way. For example, Poison and Light and The Time of the Ghosts are about women doing exciting things. Both novels contain Jews living lives with meaning. The Art of Effective Dreaming is about how we carry such knowledge and how we can change it if we want to. Langue[dot]doc 1305 questions where our interpretations of the world come from. The problem with writing such books is that a glass can never just be a glass in my mind. I need to know more about every place and every time, and I don’t need one bit of information about that glass.. I need to start off with a dozen. Then I can choose the one I need for that character at that point in time in that novel. My example of how that operates is in The Time of the Ghosts. Three women drink three cups of coffee. Each coffee reflects who the character is, and even the cups they drink from are quite different. One carries the cultural baggage of not questioning where things come from and accepting stereotypes, while the other two celebrate who they are.
I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.
Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (