The Little Dog Laughed

This list caused some heated debate when Ian Sales posted it to Facebook. 23 men, one woman. Apparently asking for more women is unreasonable as women all write Fantasy anyway. Yeah.

Let's take a look at what I've read and what I haven't, as we all so love that game.

Frank Herbert's Dune. It's probably illegal not to include this book--that would explain its ubiquity, anyway. Yes, I've read it. Let's move on.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Nope, haven't read this. Don't intend to, either. I read a short story that was a sequel, and it was a) without plot and b) without conflict. Pretty dull. Or dull but not even pretty.

I'm also aware of issues surrounding Card that make me reluctant to hand him my money. But if he has a story in an anthology that I want, I'm sorry, but that's not going to stop me buying it. Principle of shifting principles?

Talking of controversial authors, next we come to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I've read a lot of Heinlein, especially at the time when I was still finding my feet in the genre and looking for another book like Brunner's Telepathist, but ST hasn't been one of them. I think my disenchantment with Heinlein set in with Friday. But he has written some entertaining and interesting books, so I wouldn't dismiss his work entirely.

Asimov's Foundation series. I've read the original trilogy, plus a really bad book that was a prequel, and which I'm not even sure was actually written by Asimov himself. It was very bad. I can't even remember what it was called. Not that I want to, particularly. If you were after a grounding in Golden Age SF, then you could do a lot worse. But the first book is almost if not quite entirely male, iirc. Tediously so. I mean, where DO all these men come from? There must be some women in the vast Empire. Somewhere.

So far, really, so predictable. Card, Heinlein and Asimov pop up with clock-like regularity on these lists, although the named books tend to vary--except in Card's case, where it's always Ender's Game. It's as if some readers come with presets. And The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, is another one you see again and again and again. Perhaps there's really only one list, which occasionally mutates.

The one Bester book I have read made such an impression that I can't remember which it was, but I think it was the other one that keeps being cited. Or maybe it was this one. Hard to care.

Next up is the third of the oft-named trilogy of safe white men--Arthur C. Clarke. I have read 2001: A Space Odyssey and thought it very dull in lots of places and rather silly at the end. Clarke may have good ideas, but his execution is not of the best, especially at novel length. Still, we wouldn't want to get uppity and start demanding literary SF, or even literate SF, now would we?

Ahem.

Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons I know nothing about, except that it's familiar from, well, lists like this one.

I have read William Gibson's Neuromancer, as well as the other two books in the Sprawl series. Slick, stylish books that have been widely if not successfully imitated.

It'd be hard to claim you have a grounding in SF without having read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. But oh he is a tedious writer, with narrative skills just above those of Clarke. Comes from having been trained as a journalist, maybe. Scary book that is gradually coming true, more's the pity.

HHGTTG by Douglas Adams. Sure, I've read it. I'd rather listen to the radio series, though, and do--often. Fun with serious undertones. Unforgettable characters. Dating rather rapidly.

Whenever someone brings forward Ubik as the Philip K. Dick book people should read, I cringe. But it's either that or The Man in the High Castle. I have to wonder why. He's written far better books than either of those. I suppose TMITHC is accessible whereas, say, Martian Time-Slip is not, but if Ubik was your first experience of PKD, I imagine you'd be put off the man for life. Unless you too have a surplus of dopamine and/or a fascination with all that religious stuff.

Joe Haldeman's Forever War I picked up cheap and read. It was okay, I guess. I've read two versions--we'll call them the Hump You version and the Fuck You version. FU was more understandable than HU, which wasn't an idiom with which I was familiar. They're entertaining enough books, I guess, but do better in the combat areas than in imagining social developments.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is another book that crawls towards this kind of list with astonishing regularity. It doesn't matter how you dress him up or what fancy gadgets you give him, a pizza delivery guy is not cool. End of. The book has its moments, but I could happily never read it again. And probably won't.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has never crossed my radar.

I think this list loses any credibility with Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Old people get young, turn green, and have a lot of sex. Who cares?

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a book I once glanced at in a bookshop and dismissed as old hat, based on the cover blurb. But I haven't actually read it, so shall say no more. Rule No. One: If you ain't read it you cain't discuss it.

Is Gene Wolfe the Island of Murdering Young Women to Heal Men guy? Anyway, haven't read The Book of the New Sun, so that's all there is to say.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, although I have seen it maligned in certain quarters. Well worth a read imo.

The Night's Dawn by Peter F. Hamilton hasn't crossed my radar before, although the author's name is familiar.

It's a relief that Frederik Pohl's Gateway has an everyman character I can relate to*. I was beginning to worry. I have a vague memory of reading some short stories about these HeeChee and enjoying them, although that may have been the BeeGees. Anyway, it's going on the wishlist.

Another book that has evaded my radar up till now is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Presumably he is to be distinguished from Robert Anton Wilson. I shall bear that in mind.

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl? Now I know you gotta be kidding. Read some way into this and found it both pointless and offensive. Quite an achievement, but not one that's worth all those literary awards.

And another Neal Stephenson, Anathem. At least that was published this century, which gives it an edge on just about everything else. Except the book that's a windup, I guess.

Peter Watts's Blindsight has hovered on the edge of my awareness for a while, but I've never thought seriously about picking it up.

Finally, at the bottom, we come to the token woman: Lois McMaster Bujold. It's hard to guess who'll it be this time, so kudos if you got it right. The list cites the entirety of the Miles Vorkosigan Saga. I've read one book in this series--The Warrior's Apprentice--which was okay but didn't entice me to read any more.

It's impossible to total up when people insist on including series. But of the authors listed, I'm confident I've read something by sixteen of the men (out of 23) and all of the women.


* I've been distrustful of the 'everyman' character ever since it became associated for me with the protagonist in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, who is a cipher.

This is what I've managed to read to the end lately (very lately in one case):

Julius by Daphne du Maurier;
The Secret History by Donna Tartt;
The Letter in the Bottle by Karen Liebreich
and
The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

There've also been some false starts that were abandoned. Not sure I want to write about those. Not sure I want to write about Julius, either, as I read it some time ago and have been hivering and havering over discussing it ever since.

Julius is not a nice book and not a nice character. He has some traits that might tentatively be identified as psychopathic. The only reason to read to the end was to hope he'd get his comeuppance, but alas he doesn't. The worst he seems to suffer is getting the brush-off from a woman he fancies, which, given the way he treats the women in his life, can only be a good thing--for her. The introduction to the book, by Julie Myerson, desperately tries to paper over the issue of how du Maurier handles Julius's Jewishness, but it can't be successfully done for a novel that states more than once that he has racial Jewish character traits. At times I felt very uncomfortable, as if I were colluding with the anti-Semitism in this book merely by reading it. The biggest irony of all being that Julius didn't have a Jewish mother anyway.

I can't recommend this book, but if you can bear the dubious politics and enjoy unredeemed and unrepentant villains, you might want to give it a look. For Julius is a shit of the highest order who refuses to save the life of the woman who (incredibly) adores him, because it would interfere with his plans to buy a cafe.

So, onwards and upwards to The Secret History, a bad novel with a good novel hidden inside it. Too well hidden, alas.

I read this book to the end because it was just interesting enough to hold my attention, and because I wanted to have read it. So many people rave about this book--and it's on so many of those lists where you try to prove you've read more books than your FB friends--that I thought, right, I've bought it and I'm gonna read it. Yeah.

This could have been a much better book. All the elements are there, the characters are there, the setting is there, but the writing isn't up to it. Too much time is spent dwelling on the awful Vermont winter the narrator spends in an unheated attic with a hole in the roof. Vile, obviously, but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT. Insofar as there is a plot. The book lacks focus, it's repetitive, and it doesn't really know what it's about. A shame.

The book also doesn't live up to the cover blurb about the influence of the charismatic teacher. I'm sure that influence is meant to be there, but it ain't. Fail.

I thought I'd made a huge mistake with The Letter in the Bottle when I read the translation (from French) of the actual letter. It was trying far too hard for my liking. Yes, it IS mean of me to critique a letter written by a grieving mother to her dead child, but given the author of the book and the woman who found the bottle were weeping like rainclouds over it, I do feel permitted to say that it did nothing for me. Too fancy. Trying too hard. Too much emotion in the writer to leave room for the reader's emotions. But then, it wasn't intended to be read.

Liebreich's search for the author of the letter found in an Evian bottle washed up on the Isle of Sheppey is fascinating. There are hilarious interludes involving a tarot reader and a clairvoyant, curious little anecdotes about letters in bottles, and Liebreich's growing frustration with her own inability either to solve the mystery or to leave it alone.

This is a revised edition of the book, issued when the author of the letter came forward. At first indignant and angry, she eventually agrees to meet Liebreich and talk a little about why she wrote the letter and what she expected to come of it. "I thought it would smash in the waves and the fragments of glass and paper would gently disperse through the oceans." (pp 278)

If you can get past the sentimentality of the mother's letter--or if it doesn't even strike you as sentimental, and you think I'm a heartless cow--this is a compelling book that's well worth a read. In any case, here's another interesting message in a bottle story to keep you entertained in the meantime :).

Finally, we come to The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings, which I finished last night. At first, I was disappointed to find that only about half the book was short stories by Gilman, and that the other half was extracts from her autobiography. But when I started to read the extracts, I realised that here--amongst, admittedly, some drek-- was easily the best writing in the book. Gilman's evocation of her experience of 'nervous prostration', ie clinical depression, is heartbreaking. It has even greater resonance than 'The Yellow Wallpaper', a short story which came directly from her own experience of a rest cure that drove her to the edge of insanity.

Anyone who wants someone to know what depression can be like should buy them a copy of this book.

I enjoyed 'The Yellow Wallpaper' very much, in a creeped-out way. Some of the stories are, to be brutally honest, mere wish-fulfillment, but I thought 'The Rocking-Chair' ought to be right up there with other exemplars of the art of the ghost-bordering-on-horror story. Why isn't it? I leave it to yourselves to decide.

Buy this book. But be prepared for printing flaws and general apparent indifference on the part of the publishers to the physical object's quality. Shame on you, Virago. Really.

Husband took me to Waterstones with an unlimited budget. He won't do that again.

The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman;
Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present by Max Boot;
Slow River by Nicola Griffith;
Half Past Human by TJ Bass;
The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy
and
My Mad Fat Diary by Rae Earl.

Also bought a book about Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut for my dad. As far as I can tell it was a big hit.

Redeemed one stampy card for £10 off the above and started a new card. Yay for stampy cards.

Forgot to mention these books husband brought me last week:

Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott
and
The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace.

I also noticed Margaret Mead's Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World on my dad's bookshelves, and I certainly plan to read that.

So, what have I been reading recently? And not posting about? Bad littlerdog.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ and Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith. Also, a reread of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Unfortunately, I think I've read P&P too many times and it's starting to lose its soothing quality. This time round I only saw flaws. Maybe I should rest it for a year or two, which'll mean I'll need to find another comfort novel. Bah. It's been my standby for calming down and ceasing to freak out for a long time now. There's times when the psyche just needs a happy ending.

What to say about the other two? It's hard.

I want to say, Novel on Yellow Paper is not a novel. Nor, indeed, was my copy (published by Virago) on yellow paper. But that comes dangerously close to saying 'this is art' but 'this is not art' merely because one meets your expectations and the other does not. Instead I'll say, it's not structured like a conventional novel. That's probably closer to the problem I had with it. That and the anti-Semitism and racism, which are no doubt products of its time, but with so many similarities between the first-person narrator, Pompey, and Smith herself, it's hard to separate the expressed views from the author. But maybe someone who self-presents as so nice yet rambunctious needs at least one flaw.

It's more of a ramble than a novel, really. Not suitable, as Pompey herself says, for feet-on-the-ground people, who presumably are people who like novels to work like novels rather than like a random smattering of thoughts. But there are some wonderful thoughts here, racism and other prejudices aside, and some marvellous writing. It's almost like a dip-in book masquerading as a novel. I loved it and hated it at the same time.

In another respect, it works as a historical document. First published in 1936, it recounts a visit Pompey made to Germany, and what she found there.

"So I rang up some Jew-friends of mine that lived out Charlottenburg way, and went to see them. This was before the Hitler campaign, or leastways it was just getting on the way, so that these Jew-friends had already had the black Hakenkreuz* scrawled up on their gatepost. But at any rate they were sound enough, with a weather eye out for self-preservation and not a sign of neurosis there." pp99

What else can I say? Read it, but be prepared to be offended, baffled, and entertained. GNDN--goes nowhere, does nothing.

The Russ book was also baffling. I think I understand the basic premise: the central character, Jai Vedh, and another man known as the Captain are marooned on an alien planet after their spaceship explodes. The planet is inhabited by humanoid telepaths who gradually introduce Vedh to his own telepathic capacity. Vedh and one of the aliens, a woman named Evne, then travel to Earth, and...well. Stuff happens. I think everyone on Earth is killed a la 2001 but one of the aspects of this novel that is most infuriating is that you're never sure what's real. The telepaths are able to manipulate Vedh's mind and this makes him unreliable in the extreme. For all we know, he never left the alien planet. Or never arrived on it. Or never was.

Too often when I read Russ's work I'm left wondering what it means. I know it means something. With a lesser writer I'd shrug and assume there was no deeper meaning there to find, but with Russ I can't. I read the book and sit and think about it but I'm baffled. What does it mean that Vedh identifies as gay yet his sexual relationships are with women? Have the telepaths changed him, or deluded him? Is any of it happening? Then I ask my friends, and they don't know either. It is a great bafflement.

Halp.

*The Hakenkreuz is better known to English-speakers as the swastika.

When the Wollstonecraft was upstairs and I was downstairs, or it was downstairs and I was upstairs, I've also been reading The Eye of the Heron and Other Stories, edited by Virginia Kidd. Although it doesn't trumpet the fact on the cover, this is an all-female anthology. Possibly a rare animal in 1980, and especially rare perhaps in feeling no need to promote? warn about? the all-femaleness. It does however feature Le Guin's name prominently on the cover, presumably in the (correct) assumption that this would sell the book. There were quite a few other Le Guin books for sale in the same charity shop, so I suspect they'd come from the estate of a fan.

Contents

Prayer for my Daughter by Marilyn Hacker (poem);
'No One Said Forever' by Cynthia Felice;
'The Song of N'Sardi-el' by Diana L. Paxson;
'Jubilee's Story' by Elizabeth A. Lynn;
'Mab Gallen Recalled' by Cherry Wilder;
'Phoenix in the Ashes' by Joan D. Vinge
and
The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Too tired right now to discuss the stories, but this anthology is worth a read if you can find it anywhere.

Somewhere along the line I've neglected to note when and/or where I picked up Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot. It's a Women's Press book; I tend to grab those when I see them. Not that that does the tiny press much good, as they're invariably secondhand, but they're usually niche books of the kind you won't find falling off the shelves in Waterstones any time soon. If I could find them new I'd buy them new. But distribution is often a problem for small presses, so I'm usually reduced to grabbing what I can. Sorry, people.

This book was a hard and uncomfortable read. It's told uncompromisingly in first person by the narrator, Abra (I just had to go and check the spelling of her name, as it's not one I've ever encountered before), who leads a conventional woman's life until she suddenly runs out on her family and goes to live as a virtual hermit in a cabin that calls to her as 'home'.

It's hard to know what to think about Abra, as a character who's abnegated responsibility and is utterly frank and guilt-free about it has their charm. But on the whole, I think that when her daughter calls her selfish, she's right. Abra strikes me as soul-sister to all those people who want to 'find themselves' or who have to prove they're 'free' by starting a relationship then deliberately ending it. I have no problem with her wanting to live alone, to care for herself only, to evade all responsibility, including that for an injured squirrel whose life she saves. In many ways, I sympathise. That kind of life certainly has its appeal. It's her abnegation of responsibility for her two children that grates.

At all phases of her life, Abra abnegates responsibility for her decisions. She doesn't decide to get married; it just happens. She doesn't decide to take a job in a dress shop to support her husband through college; it just happens. She doesn't decide to quit the job once he graduates; it just happens. She doesn't decide to have children; it just happens. She doesn't even decide to leave her family for the cabin; it just happens. In this repeated claim to be merely the victim of circumstance, she disgusts me.

Yes, many of us often feel (or claim) we 'have no choice', but choosing not to resist the pattern of events is in itself a choice.

Living in her own little world, where nobody can make demands on her, Abra is suddenly interrupted by her daughter Katie, who wants answers and even, possibly, a relationship. Abra isn't capable of either. At the opening of the book, she's barely able to remember her own name, so deeply has she immersed herself in herself. As well as labelling her mother selfish, Katie calls her 'mad' and certainly there's something disassociative going on here. Towards the end of the book, Abra sees herself briefly as the outside world may see her, and doesn't like what she sees, but the moment passes.

It's hard to know what to make of this book as it presents the character as she presents herself, with all judgement left to the reader, should they choose to pass any. It's a detailed, fascinating portrait of a woman who throws it all up and walks away to be herself. Not a nice self, but who says women have to be nice?