reading – Treehouse Writers

Cover of The Peripheral by William Gibson My writers group tries to do a retreat every year, and since we live in six states and three time zones, it’s always a little complicated to figure out where and when. This year we opted for Minneapolis, a place where it’s possible to get a sufficiently large vacation rental at a reasonable price and one that’s not too hard to get to from all our locations.

That also meant we got in a visit to DreamHaven Books and Comics – a place worthy of a trip to Minneapolis on its own – and being readers as well as writers, we bought books.

Among the books I got were two I’d already read from the library, but wanted to read again and own, the most recent books by William Gibson: The Peripheral and Agency. And, since I came home to needing to deal with a few stressful things, I have now re-read them both.

(I note that one form of reading that we don’t talk about much is reading to escape responsibilities. I perfected this skill as a kid, and I still fall back on it.)

These books are a tour de force, masterpieces of invention and writing from an author whose skill is legendary. I first read Gibson when Neuromancer came out in the 1980s. He was one of the few male authors I read back then and the only one of the cyberpunk group I really appreciated.

On this re-read, I was in awe at the way he constructed the story

I loved The Peripheral when I first read it — I wrote about it here — and I loved it again this time. I don’t like Agency as much, but I still enjoyed the re-read. Part of that is the characters; I’m more inclined to appreciate people struggling to get by in a southern town in a dystopic near future than I am techbro adjacent folks in a San Francisco of my own timeline.

But this time around the books made me think about some other aspects of both the stories and how those things relate to the reality we’re living in now – a reality that seems to set up all too easily the “Jackpot” that underlies the books.

I can’t talk about this without getting into some spoilers, so I’m going to do a page break here in case you want to read the books first. I know they’ve been out quite awhile – The Peripheral was published in 2014 (and there was even a streaming series), Agency in 2020 – but I want to be polite to anyone who hasn’t read them as well as to recommend that you do so. Continue reading “Re-reading William Gibson”…

I first encountered Gloria Steinem in the 1960s in the pages of Glamour magazine. I don’t remember what she was writing about, though it was a number of articles over a couple of years – she wrote for them regularly, though I have not yet seen a mention of that particular magazine in the obituaries.

I can’t tell you who else wrote for Glamour back then, or much of what else was in the magazine. It was aimed at selling beauty products and clothes to young women and most of the articles promoted that in some way. It was, in many ways, the antithesis of MS. magazine, which Steinem and others started a few years later.

But I noticed Steinem from the first piece of hers I read. It was smart. She clearly had something to say. And after that, I sought out issues of the magazine that had an article by her.

I was a young teenager, but I disdained the magazines aimed at people my age. After all, I was already reading adult fiction and had been since about the age of 10. (Young adult fiction was laughable back then. Sue Barton, Student Nurse. I outgrew that by the age of 8.)

Even Seventeen seemed too childish for me, but Glamour (which was probably aimed at people in their late teens, early 20s) struck me as sophisticated without being out of reach, like Vogue was.

And yes, I read more serious magazines as well. The New Yorker (albeit mostly the cartoons). The Atlantic. The Texas Observer. But I was a young girl trying to figure out where I fit into the world, so I turned to Glamour as well.

Having read a lot of her work, I took Steinem very seriously when she got involved in second wave feminism and started MS. I continued to take her seriously throughout her life. Continue reading “The Importance of Writers”…