Yet More Misogyny and Recent Reads

So there's a big flap going on about the sexist content of the recent bulletins of SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. To be clear, the bulletins aren't just little shitty newsletters, they're glossy printed magazines, and a one-year subscription will set you back $32 for four issues. To be further clear, I don't feel like saying much about this issue is really up to me, as I'm not a member of SFWA and haven't personally read the controversial content in question. So I'll summarize that from what I've read - and Googling and spending half an hour reading blogs and forums seems to be the only way to find out what went on if you don't have access to the bulletins themselves, which is why I'm talking around this instead of speaking to it directly - this is more gender bullshit from entrenched misogynists in the SF/F publishing industry, and it's worth getting pissed off about.

I have looked forward to joining SFWA for years, and now I don't think I want to, if/when I'm on the point of qualifying. E. Catherine Tobler has explained the situation eloquently here, and Samantha Henderson has responded more similarly to how I would (i.e. more weariness, fury, and swears) here. I'm a little disturbed that Scalzi didn't do more to halt this (he's the president of SFWA), but there's too much I don't know to place any real blame on him.

On to the reads.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I flew just under 6,000 miles in three days (yes, my arms are tired), and this meant a lot of reading got done.

Before I left, I read Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, a short book by William Styron about his depression becoming a full-blown breakdown. I wanted to read it because I wanted to know what a skilled wordsmith would say about madness, which I mistakenly thought he'd explore in more detail than the (far more familiar to me) business of depression. This brief book unfortunately slimed me a little with the mental ectoplasm of the Great Male Narcissist. I know the essay was meant to be about him and his suffering with depression, but even at that it still seemed overly self-involved. I think this is what happens with depression.

I also read The Quiet Room, a uniquely structured memoiresque book about schizophrenia nominally by Lori Schiller. I walked away with many remaining unanswered questions about schizophrenia, but a better picture of the course of the illness and some of the experience of it. The best part about it was the well-balanced picture of the human cost and tale of schizophrenia - how it affects loved ones over the long term as well as its sufferer. I have a bunch more books about schizoaffective disorders on my TBR list (including one about, get this, identical twins, one of whom suffered from schizophrenia while the other one didn't). It's a mental illness I don't understand especially well, and I'd like to.

On the trip I read Dead Ever After, the final Sookie Stackhouse book. A few shenanigans here and there, but EXTREMELY satisfying (although YMMV if you were an Eric fan, which I decidedly am not). I'm sorry there won't be any more books about her, but I'm also kind of glad. She's in a happy place.

I read the fourth of Chelsea Cain's thrillers about Archie Sheridan, The Night Season, as quickly as the other three. It took several unexpected directions, and I can see how it may have been disappointing for some readers, but I enormously enjoyed it.

And I read State of Wonder, Ann Patchett's latest. It's the first of her books I've read. It reminded me a lot of The Poisonwood Bible, which I didn't particularly like, and I found myself looking forward to finishing, but also reading with enjoyment (Patchett creates narrative tension extraordinarily well). The book seemed limp, dependent on its settings, and much of its plot struck me as outlandish. Yet when I was in the last chapter, I felt like I'd been through a remarkable experience. I looked back at the journey of the novel with amazement and pleasure at what I and the characters had been through. Ultimately I am confused about it.

I felt this way after The Accidental Tourist. Not a book I especially enjoyed, but I'm glad I read it, and bits and pieces of the characters and events kept popping up in my head long after I'd finished. On balance, was this a good reading experience? I have no idea.

I planned to start Redshirts when I got home, and read it halfsies with Faithful Place, a mystery/thriller by an Irish writer named Tana French who was recommended by a blogger I like. I blew through Redshirts in about four hours all told, before I'd even properly started the other book. Rollicking, most excellent fun. I read Faithful Place all last week, and I loved it to pieces. The writing was extraordinary on a sentence-by-sentence basis, witty and delightful, and the character-building and tension were wonderful. In truth, few books I've ever read have made me either laugh or ache as often as this book did. Potent stuff. Off I go to devour French's three other books.

I'm reading more and more thrillers in the last year or so, and I don't really know why. I've read heavy-hitting thriller writers like James Patterson and Scott Turow and haven't especially liked them - they feel pretty blatantly like junk food - and I don't often enjoy standard mysteries of the Christie type. But I keep stumbling upon midlist writers like Chelsea Cain and Tana French and wanting nothing more than to read them all the time.

What I really need to do is get back to my own writing. I've settled on the wikibook as the next project, and its structure is ideal for doing a little bit at a time, a few pages every day, in between research, outlining, reading, etc. But elephant-eating is a difficult business.

Picture credit to Shel Silverstein (obviously)

Isn't It Just Contemporary Fantasy?

In my local library, the SF and fantasy are in a section far away from the regular fiction section, and in fact are in the same area as teen fiction. I am not in love with what this connotes but, you know, oh well. I was browsing along the shelves a few weeks ago and came upon The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Beagle and Lansdale and with a few top-notch authors in it, and picked it up. I've heard an awful lot about urban fantasy in the last five years, and seen increasing numbers of these terrible covers at Barnes & Noble, but if you asked me to define it I could only guess lamely. (Related to that link and well worth reading: this. Also this, funnier still.) I thought it would help to read a whole anthology of the actual genre.

There are no fewer than four introductions in this book, and three of them mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I saw that, I went [oh.] So that's what urban fantasy is. It would be nice if they'd just said that.

As I work my way through the stories, a lot of what I read reminds me of Charlaine Harris's Sookie books, which I read voraciously whenever they're released (every year on the dot - actually, it's May, isn't it? Yessss!) and which I love for their transparency and speed and sex scenes. I would never call them great literature, and some of them I wouldn't even call good writing. They are, however, extremely fun. But there's a sort of studied casualness to the fantasy aspects of both those books and these stories that I find hampering. I remember, when reading Neverwhere, how effortlessly Gaiman introduced London Below, and how he didn't linger or waste words on supernatural stuff when it wasn't necessary. This is hard to do while building a genuine world, really really hard, and some of the authors in this anthology don't seem to have mastered it.

The thing that bothers me, though, is how ho-hum the stuff that comprises "urban fantasy" seems to me. In the anthology, I've read a pretty good but more or less standard ghost story; a lovely Gaiman story, wistful and imaginative and really very unfantastic (and not at all encouraging to someone moving to Los Angeles in a few weeks); a story by Lansdale that I truly hated, a dudeish post-apocalyptic zombie/sex bloodbath without a single pleasant sentence; and a few others in the realm of fantasy that I enjoyed, but that I wouldn't call urban. I guess I pictured that those ubiquitous kickass book-cover chicks would be parkouring all over a sooty Gotham with explosively powerful crossbows. In fact, yes, that's exactly what I pictured when I thought of "urban fantasy". Is there a book like that, one that's actually decent? Because I'd read that.

In other news, I have another story idea. This one might keep me from having to write the old old idea that I fear fucking up, or from having to iron out the Marilyn book until I get my nerve up.

In the last week, I've completely gorged on Twilight Rifftrax, watching all four released movies with their accompanying riffs. It's really helped. While I'm not exactly embarrassed about the thoughtfulness with which I've (perhaps needlessly) approached the series in the past and the complete sucker that the romance bits made of me, I did want to have a more objective view of the whole thing. Rifftrax has helped with that a lot, although I still find myself being a sucker for certain aspects of the movies.

That suckerism, along with some gender reading I've done in the past couple of weeks, made me ache desperately to write...something. Some kind of thing that would explore idealism and yearning in relationships, that would get down to real words all the vaguenesses I feel when I read romance novels and watch Edward and Bella getting it on. An essay wouldn't do it, wouldn't give me the freedom I needed. So I was really grateful when I came up with this idea. It's sci-fucking-fi, AGAIN. Digging myself in deeper. I suppose I could mutate it to more present-moment fantasy, make it fae instead of techy, but that's not how I picture it right now.

Of course, writing will have to wait until I get some actual frickin' sleep. Or have my house packed and ready to move. Or find a renter. Or...daaaaaaah.

In this post I've copped to devouring Sookie Stackhouse books and getting roped in by Twilight. If you're just joining me for the first time, I promise I'm not always such an airhead. It's just, y'know, you have to read everything. High, low, creamy middle. Stick only to uppercrust stuff and you become Harold Bloom: soulless, snobby, relentlessly confused about why the world doesn't agree with you. I'LL GET YOU ONE DAY, BLOOM! BLOOOOOOOM!!