Category: Books

Considering Mr. Rochester

personby Madeleine Robins
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I may have too much time on my hands. In the last week or so I have watched seven different filmed versions of Jane Eyre, trying to see how each of them handled the question of Mr. Rochester.

If you’re paying any attention at all, Edward Fairfax Rochester is a problem. He hides his wife in the attic for fifteen years.  His pleasure-seeking lifestyle on the continent does not command admiration. He is sarcastic–even snarky–to the people around him. And, of course, he attempts to trick his governess into marrying him bigamously. He is not a good guy.

And yet, when the book is done and Jane admits, “Reader, I married him,” I am happy for them both.

Why is Rochester a bad guy? Let’s assume that Charlotte Bronté’s version of the story is made of truth all the way through (Wide Sargasso Sea not withstanding).  If you work the text backward, Rochester is 21 when he is sent, by his father and older brother, to marry Bertha Mason in Jamaica. It’s a purely mercenary action on the parts of Rochester pere and older fils: they need the significant money that marriage will provide and they don’t care who he’s marrying to get it. Young Edward is a sacrifice on the altar of Mammon. And the Masons (according to the text) have their own reason to hurry the marriage forward–Bertha’s Creole mother is mad, and they suspect some tendencies in that direction in bride. So this 21-year-old kid is sent, under orders, to marry a woman who is a stranger to him. She’s beautiful, and he’s naive enough to think he’s lucked out. Continue reading “Considering Mr. Rochester”…

Memories

personby Gillian Polack
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When my life is a bit too busy or the illnesses eat my energy, I’m going to share with you something about my books or something I wrote for another time in another place. Today it’s the latter, and I feel wildly historical, so here’s an article I wrote for BiblioBuffet in 2011. Why did I choose this? I’d love to know what books you’d use to illustrate some of the things you read for. I want to know what books I’d place, 15 years on and to find out if my reading has changed in nature, but for that I need energy. One day. Today is about the books I read one week, back in 2011, and why I enjoyed them.

 

 

I love lists. Today I have a list that’s ten items long. It could have been five, or a hundred, or even a thousand. I wanted to tell you ten things I love about books and illustrate them using some of my recent reading. Some of the recent reading is hot off the press, and some is less so. I’ve chosen books from the speculative fiction end of the reading spectrum. This might be because they reflect my reading recently. It’s just possible. Let me admit, up front, that I know some of these writers. I wish I knew them all, but I know just a couple. Once there is something in someone’s writing that you love, the likelihood is quite high that when you meet the person in question, that you will get on. I’ve only given examples from writers whose books struck me for these precise reasons before I ever met the writer in question.

My ten things:

1. I love exploring someone else’s politics through their fiction, especially when that fiction is very fine. My book for this is Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It’s all about freedom and the life of the mind and the limitations that we humans place upon ourselves. A lot of political books written in the 1970s have dated, for life has changed since the seventies, but this one hasn’t dated at all. It’s still vibrant and forceful.

2. Lyrical writing couched secretly inside a genre novel. It takes me by surprise and gives me a sense of the world being right, every time. So many of my favourite writers have this flavour in their writing: Hope Mirrlees, Alma Alexander, Mervyn Peake. My example for today, however, is Daniel Fox’s Dragon in Chains because he manages to take a non-Western universe and make it feel particular and its own, while still maintaining that lyricism.

3. Sometimes language and concept and personality infuse a writer’s work. Cordawiner Smith and Roger Zelazy are two writers who don’t seem to be able to write a word of fiction without that word somehow defining the universe anew. My example book is probably the least of all the writings of both authors: Roger Zelazny’s The Last Defender of Camelot. It is, however, the one I re-read most recently. When I get some time, I intend to re-read the whole Amber cycle, plus Smith’s Norstrilia books. Time is the limiting factor. Their worlds and their words haunt me even when I don’t go near the writing for years on end.

4. The historian deep inside me (well, maybe not so deep, in fact maybe just the one who shares the same skin as the rest of me) loves a book that explores another world that breaks with what we accept as normal reality and that does so in such a way that the reader accepts things that are unacceptable or understands things that are usually conceptually too difficult. Not that I want to accept the unacceptable, but that I really like writing that’s strong backing world building that’s even stronger. Aliette de Bodard’s Harbinger of the Storm is today’s example of that. An Aztec society, with gods and belief systems and treatment of women that are very uncomfortable for me, and yet I must read and continue reading for she makes it real. Lord of the Flies was the same but more so ‑ hate the world, but must believe it can exist.

5. There is happiness in small things. Grumpy fairy tales and twisted minds. When I was a child I read James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks and The Wonderful O. They rang truer for me than most other children’s literature at that time. The other book that I fell in love with (and have a lion’s head doorknocker right now, to prove that doorknockers are crucial to grumpy magical existence) is William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring. The bizarre fairytale is still my favourite book by Thackeray, and this despite me having read Vanity Fair at least four times.

6. There are warped and twisted books for adults, also. There is Shriek. An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer and there is almost anything by James Enge. I was reading Enge’s The Wolf Age and I finally realised that it’s not the sharpness of these books or even their views on society that make them so delightful, it’s their inventiveness. Enge’s imagination is always one step beyond my mind’s reasoning ‑ he manages to think of places I’ve never thought of and make fantasy worlds look fresh and new.

7. There are trilogies. There are sets of trilogies. What there are, too, are occasional authors who manage to write one big book that has been broken up into parts that make coherent narrative sense but that are nevertheless mere aspects of one big book. I always find one of these near my desk, for I have a weakness for them. Right now there are two books by Joe Abercrombie, and there is Ravensoul, part 4 of James Barclay’s Legends of the Raven.

8. I love it when the people of two worlds meet. There’s always a book in my vicinity that shows the clash of cultures or someone who was brought up in two worlds or is touched by two worlds and has difficult choices ahead. The most recent book that touched on this (and leaves it unresolved ‑ I must read the next book!) is Jon Sprunk’s Shadow’s Lure.

9. Steampunk! Right now, for me, steampunk is alone enough to make me look twice at something. From the reasonably standard romantic approach to machines and villains and changing worlds expressed in Andrew P Mayer’s The Falling Machine to the steampunk romance of Katie MacAlister, but the best encapsulation right now, for me, personally, is in the work of Cherie Priest.

10. New approaches to something that I thought I knew. Eye-opening and making the whole world new. This is the most exciting writing of all. My example is Kafakaesque, and I shall write about it properly in due course. Some books demand attention of their own, and this is one. The editors’ genius in placing Carol Emshwiller, Kate Wilhelm and Theodora Goss in the same volume make it something that shifts what thought I knew about short stories. This is my current reading, and it’s wonderful.

Books mentioned in this column:

The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber (NYR Children’s Collection, 2008) 978-1590172759

Changer of Days, Alma Alexander (HarperVoyager, 2005) 978-0060765750

The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin (HarperVoyager, 1994) 978-0061054884

Dragon in Chains, by Daniel Fox (Del Rey, 2009) 978-0345503053

The Falling Machine, by Andrew P Mayer (Pyr, 2011) 978-1616143756

Harbinger of the Storm, by Aliette de Bodard (Angry Robot, 2011) 978-0857660763

Kafakaesque, John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (ed) (Tachyon, 2011) 978 1 61696 049 0

The Last Defender of Camelot, Roger Zelazny (ibooks, 2007) 978-1596871076

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding (Perigee Trade, 2003) 978-0399529207

Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees (Cold Spring Press, 2005) 978-1593600419

Ravensoul, by James Barclay (Pyr, 2011) 978-1616143817

The Rose and the Ring, by WM Thackeray (Folio Society, 1964)

Shadow’s Lure, By Jon Sprunk (Pyr, 2011) 978-1616143718

Shriek. An Afterword, by Jeff VanderMeer (Tor, 2007) 978-0765314666

The Wolf Age, by James Enge (Pyr, 2010) 978-1616142438

The Wonderful O, by James Thurber (NYR Children’s Collection, 2009) 978-1590173091

A Fortnight in the Life

personby Gillian Polack
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This week’s post is about my next few days. I’ll skip most of the writing and editing and publishing side, because they’re posts all of their own. One day, you will learn more. Keep reading, because eventually there is coffee.

This weekend I’ll be at Octocon. Online in Ireland. This is the Ireland we don’t see in the news. I feel safe there. In honour of an Irish friend who I (alas) haven’t seen in decades, let me share his cure for hangovers to provide a bridge between the antisemitic country we hear about and the kindness and openness of fandom in Ireland and Northern Ireland: 1 part port to one part brandy. Any quantity. If necessary repeat the dose several hours later.

I’m on two panels and giving a workshop on world building. I do love sharing my worldbuilding research. Each time I teach it a bit differently. This time it’s going to be all about Medieval magic. Not all Medieval magic, but how to incorporate certain aspects of that magic into your perfect novel in a way that makes it feel to the reader that they can find that magic portal and enter your world.

Another thing-of-the-moment is waiting anxiously to see if a kickstarter gets up. I have an essay in the book being kickstarted and I so want it to become published. It’s also related to my research self linking with my writing self. It’s the uni classes I would be giving if I were still in the teaching system in Canberra but, alas, Canberra is still not keen on me teaching and I’ve given up asking and instead written an essay: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/benyehuda/again-at-a-crossroads

What else am I doing? Eating fruit and nuts, because it’s Sukkot. Being worried a bit because ASIO tells us that Jews here are still under threat. Dealing with hate. Dealing with hate has been an everyday thing for 3 years now (the anniversary in the Jewish calendar of October 7 is at the end of Sukkot) and you’ve heard enough about it, so I won’t explore it here.

I’m revising my own thoughts about the world. I do this regularly. I’m an ethnohistorian, I know that people change and culture changes and I need to know how I change. Every bit of my own bias I understand, I can factor into my other work. When I realised that being hated was a bad path to take for self-analysis, I decided to watch old TV to remind myself of where I have been and give myself context to explain how I deal with this interesting new world. I’m watching two shows right now to give myself this context. One is Heroes, which was first shown in Australia after I’d started looking into how we see heroes in story. I began on that trail 45 years ago, so it’s a handy trail to look back from and check for change. When heroes was first release I was in the middle of formulating a tool, which I never took up academically but which is a lot of fun socially. If our TV was seen by aliens or our literature read by aliens, how would they see humans? I looked at gender, age, cultural background, religious background, amount of violence, amount and nature of sex-related stuff, material goods, use of tropes… No big project because no funding for it, alas. I still play with aspects of the idea, however.

The other show is Doctor Who. I saw the original when I was very small, and it’s been part of my viewing life. Every twenty years I watch as much as I can and it shows me how I have travelled to reach my current point. Last time I rewatched was the year before the new series, because our public broadcaster showed much of the surviving Who. Oddly, I could remember the bits that were not there. Later, as other bits became cartoonified and put to the original audio, I discovered a strange phenomenon: I could remember the original and, in one story in particular, it was as if the original walked alongside the new version and they argued with each other.

Now I’m in the 70s with Tom Baker. I was in high school when it was first shown, and it’s a wonderful tool for bringing back lost memories. When I say “Tom Baker” people instantly tell me about the scarf, but what I find is that Baker himself acts as himself and so the Doctor is real and so… it’s closer to who I was as a teen and how I saw myself.

My family never let me become properly Gothic and was not kind in the way they prevented it (which is another story), so some of the Baker episodes show me a path I wanted to travel but could not. I suspect this will appear in my fiction sooner rather than alter, because I have a character at hand who needs to discover something related.

Everything returns to story in my life. Always. This is not a bad thing.

Another thing that is not bad at all is that a friend gave me some of the spice mix used in Yemeni coffee. It fits with the way coffee was made in the region in the 15th century. When time permits, I’ll see if I can find out the relationship between the current spice mix and the history of coffee. I need to get through the next few weeks first, however. I’ve told you the tip of the iceberg, but I do not want the actual iceberg to turn my life into another Titanic accident. This takes careful navigation.

Reading The Nerd Reich

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Cover of The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran Black and white letters on a red backgroundI’ve finally finished reading Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich, and I recommend it highly. Not that it’s not a tough read in spots – the extreme agendas and immense power and wealth of some of those he’s writing about are hard to take in.

But it’s worth your while, because in addition to the immediate dangers we face from the right-wing extremists now running our government, the risks posed by the broligarch crowd must be dealt with. And defeating them will not be as simple as Democrats winning the next election (not that that’s all that simple), especially when some of those Democrats are all too willing to play footsie with the broligarchs.

Although the book requires you to spend a lot of time with some very unpleasant people (Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, just to name two), Durán does not mince words about the wrongness of their approaches or actions. Having just finished reading Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards for our Strike Debt book club, I found that necessary and comforting.

(While Slobodian’s book is a very detailed recounting of right-wing extremist economists, it is written on the assumption that readers are aware of how awful these people are, so it just recounts what they have done. I would have preferred it if he had interjected something from time to time to show us the damage the people did, even when I was aware of it, just to relieve the unrelenting pressure of their presence.)

Durán is a reporter by training and the book shows just how much effort he’s put into understanding the broligarch crowd and what they want to do. He documents what he says thoroughly and, likely due to his journalism background, he writes very well and very clearly. Continue reading “Reading The Nerd Reich“…

Is it Still Monday in California?

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m so late today that I’m (almost) posting on your tomorrow… which was my tomorrow over 15 hours ago. It’s been a busy day and was a busy yesterday and I’m so tired that I want to use colloquialisms. I shall refrain, because Australian colloquialisms can read as rather rude to North Americans.

Yesterday afternoon I finished with my end of the proofs of the forthcoming novel, then I went to a book launch. Then I had an online meeting and we updated each other on antisemitism. There were other things, too, but I forget. I did all this with the eye problems and every minute the world felt funky.

This morning was a grocery delivery and an emergency printout of stuff for a friend (at which point my printer failed) and we have a weather shift (it being spring here) and so my joints reminded me they hate weather. All my joints. Why the little toe aching is more annoying than the back aching is something I cannot work out.

I ought to be celebrating receiving copies of the German translation of one of my favourite short stories. There is an academic comment on my sense if humour, so my sense of humour is officially an academic thing now. In German academia. This is important, because a French translation of another story, a while back, turned all the subtlety into sarcasm and the story was not funny at all.
I’m also giving a workshop for ConSYDeration in two weeks. ConSYDeration is part of the Sydney Fringe Festival and this is my first time even getting to the Fringe. Which means, of course, my next thing is to update my handout for the workshop because I forgot to add my list of publications. It’s not gratuitous advertising this time round – my non-fiction is directly relevant to the workshop.

And all this is why, in a few minutes, I’m going to make a cuppa and watch some William Hartnell Doctor Who for a bit. I have so much to do but my body tells me to be gentle. I might put a bit of cinnamon in my tea. Later I’ll do more of the things.

I have been considering my New year, which is way soon. If anyone wants either or both of my grandmothers’ honey cake recipes here, next week, just say and I will oblige.

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

John Warner’s More Than Words

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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cover of the book More Than WordsI’ve subscribed to John Warner’s newsletter, “The Biblioracle Recommends,” for some time now. It’s all about reading and writing, a thoughtful source for ideas on how to teach writing and for clear criticism of so-called AI.

He publishes every Sunday and I set aside time to read his essay carefully because he always gives me something to chew on. With that in mind, I checked his latest book More Than Words out of my library.

I was not disappointed.

Warner writes lyrically about writing in ways that will make perfect sense to all writers. For me, reading this book put a name to many things about writing that I knew but had never put into words.

For example, he says:

If we consider writing as the fully embodied practice that it is, words and sentences are not the basics or base units of writing. To start writing, first you need an idea.

Then he adds, after having spent some time thinking about what he just wrote:

It’s not even a full-fledged idea that’s the base unit of writing. It’s something smaller. Let’s call it a “notion.” If an idea is the atom, the true building block of writing matter, consider the notion a subatomic particle, perhaps along with the “inkling,” “sense,” “suspicion,” and “hunch.”

He also quotes from other good writers.

I often feel that I don’t think hard enough about things until I have to write about them.
—Rebecca Solnit

 A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann 

Continue reading “John Warner’s More Than Words“…

What Novels Can Be

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A sailboat on a blue sea. The cover of the book The Curve of the World.Some years ago I took a workshop with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he pointed out – referencing criticisms of his books for being too expository – that one of the things a novel does is give you room to put all those details in.

Short stories are best when they leave out everything that isn’t essential. Flash fiction is the most extreme version of this. But novels can be expansive.

In keeping with this, I remember a concept that I believe I first heard from Vonda N. McIntyre: there are rules for writing a novel but no one knows what they are.

Of course, Vonda didn’t ever write the same book twice. Neither, by the way, does Karen Joy Fowler, but I’m thinking about Vonda today because her last book, The Curve of the World, just came out from Aqueduct Press.

It’s a fabulous book, but it doesn’t fit easily into people’s preconceptions about what a novel ought to be.

Vonda always described herself as a science fiction writer, even when some people persisted in calling The Moon and the Sun “fantasy.” In the chat on the online launch of The Curve of the World last Saturday, John Berry observed that Vonda didn’t consider the book to be alternative history.

I’d call it speculative history, but I’m pretty sure Vonda thought of it as science fiction set in the past – speculation about what those cultures and lives might be.

As someone who has read David Graeber and David Wengrew’s The Dawn of Everything, I think Vonda’s speculation about the past is, at its core, as true to what might have happened as it can be for a time about which we have little information. Things could have happened the way Vonda imagined them. Continue reading “What Novels Can Be”…

Threads and Stitches

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A few years back, at an event in which Rebecca Solnit was talking with Joan Halifax Roshi, she said something I remember as “You know what you do. You don’t know what you do does.”

That apparently can be traced back to Foucault. I am not well-versed in Foucault, but I like the idea a lot. You should just do your work – the work that you think matters – and leave what it does to the future. You can’t control what it does.

I know, for example, that various things I learned from Aikido teachers along the way have stayed with me, and that I have been pleased – and sometimes surprised – when someone tells me that something I said on the mat or in a presentation stayed with them.

Likewise many things I’ve read have affected me, such as the ones I’m writing about here. And I’m always thrilled when I discover that something I’ve written had an effect on someone else.

You do what you think is important and sometimes someone else gets it and takes it somewhere else. That’s what life is about.

I just finished reading Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End, and was struck by this sentence:

You yourself are not a single garment of destiny, but a thread or a stitch in the tapestry.

She is talking about how interconnected we are, despite all the efforts to disconnect us. It’s also a warning to let go of the hero myth, to reject the idea that there is one hero coming to save us all, that one hero becomes the garment of destiny. Continue reading “Threads and Stitches”…

Introducing Medieval England

personby Gillian Polack
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Once upon a time, I spent an inordinate amount of my life answering questions from writers about the Middle Ages. A friend suggested this become a book and we worked together on this book for a bit, then she had to move on. I was introduced to an archaeologist (Dr Katrin Kania) and the book was much more accurate. My personal style wasn’t there and all the bad jokes had to leave, but, as a reference book for writers, The Middle Ages Unlocked was immeasurably better for Katrin’s share… even though it meant losing most of my jokes. She and I both laughed at each and every jokes as they were gently edited away.

It’s not a book to sit down and rad. It’s a book to check when you want something in particular while it’s technically about England in the High Middle Ages, we included much of France.

If we were doing it again, I’d add whole swards about life in Jewish England. Some researchers have been busy in recent years and we know a lot more about English Jews before 1290, thanks to them.

There were several writers who pushed us to finishing the book: Elizabeth Chadwick, Felicity Pulman… in fact, all the authors quoted on the cover, plus a few extra. Without their support, this book would not have happened. I didn’t want to write it, you see, way back when it was first suggested. My dream book was, in fact, an analysis of Old French epic legends, especially how insults were used and how some of the most interesting people were turned into their own kind of Medieval hero. This might be why I am guilty of writing the literature chapter in The Middle Ages Unlocked and why it just might mention those epic legends. Every chapter I wrote has something that shows it’s by Gillian. The food chapter contains information about pickles, for instance.

Our aim in writing it was to have a book writers could take form the shelf and find out more. Not just factually more, but to understand how we see the Middle Ages and where else they can find things. In the age of AI, it’s a surprisingly useful volume. It doesn’t invent. It doesn’t pull from random sources. The bad side it that when you argue with it, it does not argue back.