Pandemic: inciting incidents

I posted this on social media a while back, but I keep thinking about it. There's a long history in children's literature of war, disease, natural disaster, or some other catastrophe providing inciting incidents in stories, often within the first ten pages. A few examples:

• In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie siblings leave their home in London to stay at Professor Kirke's relatively safe house in the country "because of the air-raids" of World War II.
• In The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox is sent from her home in India to the house of an uncle she's never met in England after both her parents die in a cholera epidemic.
• In The Borrowers, the unnamed Boy who has lived in India gets rheumatic fever when he comes to England for the first time; he is sent to a great-aunt's house in the country to recover.
• In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale doesn't make it to the safety of the cellar in time and a huge cyclone carries her and her Kansas farmhouse away.
• In the Tripods novels, Will Parker is about to be Capped when he hears about a society of humans resisting the alien entities that have enslaved the Earth.
• In the Series of Unfortunate Events books, the three Baudelaire siblings are cast into -- well -- a series of unfortunate events when their parents die in a mysterious fire that burns their house to the ground.
• In The House With a Clock in Its Walls, Lewis Barnavelt goes to live with his Uncle Jonathan after his parents die suddenly in a car accident.

I could cite more examples, because there are gobs of them. But I wonder: how many kidlit books of the next 20 years will use the COVID-19 pandemic as an inciting incident? It would definitely work as one. Kids being stuck inside, masking up to go out on necessary trips, parents being out of work or being forced to work in dangerous conditions through the pandemic, not being able to go to school or visit friends, having to jerry-rig all kinds of things to keep them working, getting sick, family members getting sick, parents or grandparents sickening or dying, etc., all sound like plot points that create the sort of change that pushes Our Heroes into action. I don't think it's a question of whether the pandemic will be used, but how often.

Shelf physics

I've long said that there needs to be a separate branch of physics that deals solely with bookshelves. Namely, their complete inability to hold a given quantity of books, regardless of the shelf's size. CM and I just went through the science fiction/fantasy section of our library, dusting and re-alphabetizing and so forth, because it's been a while and quite a few books were teetering precariously on the upper shelves. We pruned an entire shelf's worth of books from the library, moved several others to the YA Fiction and Folk & Fairy Tales sections, AND STILL THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH ROOM FOR OUR BOOKS ON THE SHELVES.

IT BOGGLES THE MIND!

And how can this be? (Weird little girlie: "For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!") Honestly, nobody knows. My theory: books twist space and time in ways not currently grokked by mankind. I think I've got to write a petition for a government grant to give this phenomenon further study. We would use this money to create a library big enough to hold all the books we want, and study whether the books swell to fit more than the available space.

It might need to be a rather sizable grant.

Dreamless

Elanor has never dreamed.

Instead, every time she falls asleep, she experiences the life of another person -- a boy named Takashi. And whenever Takashi falls asleep, he experiences her life in return.

Image copyrighted by Sarah Ellerton

This is the basic conceit of Dreamless, a graphic novel first published in 2009. I know I've mentioned this fantasy/historical fiction/romance tale to at least a few of you. In fact, I'd lend you my paper copy to read, but you know what? It's gone out of print, and used copies on Amazon sell for insane prices. Further, whenever my only copy of a rare book leaves the house, I get antsy.

So you'll just have to read it online, the way I first did.

I'd love to see this story made into a movie some day. AND I WANT TO SEE MORE OF IT, BOBBY CROSBY AND SARAH ELLERTON. (Spoiler alert: they don't choose to end it at the most ideal spot in the story. Still worth reading.)

Hey, Sooz, whatcha reading now?

Glad you asked.

I've got three books going at the moment -- two histories and one science fiction title. All three have proved to be slow going, but for different reasons.

Mom belongs to a book club at church, and during my two most recent visits I've read aloud to her from the latest book club title while she recuperates from surgery. (Rehabilitation isn't otherwise all that mentally stimulating, and Mom thinks I have a pleasant reading voice, so I suppose it's a good fit for her circumstances.) In the Garden of Beasts; Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is a work of creative nonfiction in the style of Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, in which the author uses historical documents and other media from the era to create a story about the American ambassador to the Third Reich that, while factual, reads with all the zest of a novel.

Why haven't I gotten far with this one? Well, it isn't for lack of trying. Trouble is, every time I sit down to read to Mom, she falls asleep -- usually within a paragraph or two, sometimes within a sentence or two. No, the book isn't boring (and I hope I'm not), but some of the medications Mom has been taking make her woozy and prone to drowsiness. Plus Mom has always had the enviable talent of falling asleep at a moment's notice. Sometimes I've cheated and read a chapter or two while she was asleep, but I don't want to get too far ahead.

I can't remember where I first heard about Ibram Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, but I was intrigued by his thesis that we've been teaching about racism and racist ideas in effect-first rather than cause-first fashion. To put it another way, it's not "ignorance and hate led to racism which in turn led to racist policies," it's more like "racist policies were rationalized by racist ideas, which led to the ignorance and hate of racism."

What's slowing me down here? This is a big, thick book which means business, and with all the going back and forth between Mom's home and the rehab center, I haven't had much time to get into the meat of it -- though what I've read thus far has been both illuminating and heartbreaking. Instead I've been focusing more on the third book in my list:

Sci-fi, bay-bee! Vast is difficult to sum up simply, but I'll do my best: the Null Boundary, a partly-organic human spaceship, is doing its best to outrun an alien cruiser created by a race known as the Chenzeme, which had a peculiar appetite for annihilating all other sentient life it encountered. Five more-or-less human beings on the Null Boundary are doing their best to outwit the Chenzeme cruiser before it catches up to them and destroys them, but they have some differences of opinion about how it should be done; some would rather kill off the alien ship, while others want to try convincing it not to harm them. The writing style of this book is metaphysically seductive; most stories which involve nanotechnology feature human beings transformed in surprising ways, their tech grown more organic than mechanical. This transformational aspect of the story provides the biggest appeal, at least for me.

Why am I not getting through this book quickly? Well, actually, I've finally started to build up some steam with Vast. As I begin reading most speculative fiction, it takes a little while to sort out the world into which I've been flung, which slows down my words per minute. Once I've got it all sorted, I can get back up to RAMMING SPEED. And I need to move along with this one, because it's an interlibrary loan and I can't renew it past the due date. Read, Sooz, read like the wind!

So what are you reading lately? And would you recommend the book(s) to others?

Readers read... no matter what.

In the last two or three years, I've noticed a tendency to read dramatically fewer books than I once did. And by "dramatically fewer," I mean "reading the same number of books in a year that I used to devour in three months." At first I chalked it up to doing most of my reading online, or that I wasn't making time to read the way I once did, or that I'd picked boring books that weren't holding my attention.

But this week I've had to grasp the horns of the real reason: it's become mechanically difficult for me to read books, because my eyes are aging.

I've always had excellent vision, and I've been able to read for as far back as my memories go, so struggling with the simple mechanics of reading is a new and singularly unwelcome experience. I'm used to curling up on the bed with a book and reading for hours, never feeling any sense of pain or fatigue other than what might come from the emotional content of the pages. I don't know exactly when I had to start squinting to try to make the seemingly double-printed letters come into focus, or when I began holding a book at arm's length as though it were some species of unwanted suitor. And I'm not used to giving up and turning on a blazing overhead light just to make the text readable. But I've also gritted my teeth and resisted buying reading glasses, because... well, you know.

Today, though, after another stare into the drugstore mirror and another wince, I took the plunge and bought a basic set of readers. They look just as horrible on me as any other pair of frames I've ever tried on. But today the thought finally struck me: I'll never have to wear these things in public. I can keep them at home, use them whenever I want to read without discomfort. I'll get through many more books without having to grapple with the twinges of a tension headache, and it won't matter if I look like a complete doofus because nobody will see me (well, except maybe Captain Midnight, and he's sworn to secrecy).

So... yeah. Got home, tried 'em out, got through four chapters of a book that's been languishing on the top of my dresser since mid-2015. This is going to work out swimmingly.

Stitching the story together

I've opined before that creative writing is, in many ways, akin to the process of putting a patchwork quilt together -- the goal is to take various bits and pieces culled from life experiences, other people's stories, random news articles, myths and fairy tales, and whatever else takes your fancy, and sew them together as deftly as possible to create what appears to be a seamless whole. Most of the time, when highly skilled storytellers go to work, they create novels and short stories that are so well written as to seem flawless.

But sometimes, every now and again, a reader can see the seams in a story.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the story was poorly written. More often than not, it means that the reader knows the author, or knows something about the author, and so is able to identify where a particular bit of background texture or a plot point comes from. The stitches may be so close and even as to be nearly invisible, but you can identify it as patchwork because you can remember the shirt from which it was cut.

Here are a few recent examples from a book I just finished reading, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, a 1996 novel by Orson Scott Card. Pastwatch is a great read. Its central conceit is a future in which people have developed and refined a technology that allows them to see as far back into the past as they choose, and to observe the fine details of various people's lives. Seeing the many social and personal wounds inflicted by the institution of slavery, one woman decides that she must find a way to alter the past and bring greater justice to the world.

Now that's an interesting premise, and you could go in many different directions with the basic idea. (I immediately began asking myself, "How would such technology affect belief systems? What would happen if you could see for yourself whether Jesus really walked on water, or whether Mohammed actually flew to the various heavens on a winged steed called Buraq, or whether Moses truly parted the Red Sea and allowed the Israelites to walk through on dry ground? How does belief in human beings as a unique creation survive when you're able to see the lives of creatures like Lucy and track the processes of human evolution? By being able to see past events with perfect clarity and certitude, would people lose their faith altogether or develop greater faith than before?" While these questions are not directly addressed in Pastwatch, some characters are depicted as overtly religious, so one assumes they must have found a way to reconcile their beliefs with the knowledge of past events.) But Card decides that the most profitable use of his premise is to focus on a linchpin individual, one whose life changed the course of history: the man known variously as Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón and Christopher Columbus. Card (and, by extension, his characters) posits that by changing one man's life, one man's heart, it might be possible to change the entire course of world history in a single stroke.

The first time I noticed a seam in this book was relatively early in the tale. As the Pastwatch participants discuss the relative merits of attempting to retroactively change their past, a character called Kemal points up the differences between slavery and other forms of human bondage. Here's what he says on page 93:

In some cultures, deposed kings were kept in captivity, where they had children born in captivity, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who were never harmed, but never allowed to leave.

Now, this historical tidbit could have originated from any number of places. It could have come from the Bible, where Nebuchadnezzar takes the Judean King Zedekiah captive, except one can hardly claim Zedekiah was "never harmed" -- they first killed his sons before his eyes, then blinded him and put him in chains to be hauled off to Babylon. (Poor Zedekiah.) It could have come from medieval history, as in the case of Guy de Lusignan, king of the Crusader state of Jerusalem who was captured and held by Saladin, except Guy was only held prisoner for about a year -- no generations of descendants kept in captivity there. But I'm almost certain I know the origin of this idea because Orson Scott Card, like me, is a Mormon. Which means the most likely place he found this tidbit to sew into his story was the book of Ether, a section of the Book of Mormon, where it seems to be a favored political tactic of a people called the Jaredites:

And it came to pass that Hearthom reigned in the stead of his father. And when Hearthom had reigned twenty and four years, behold, the kingdom was taken away from him. And he served many years in captivity, yea, even all the remainder of his days.
And he begat Heth, and Heth lived in captivity all his days. And Heth begat Aaron, and Aaron dwelt in captivity all his days; and he begat Amnigaddah, and Amnigaddah also dwelt in captivity all his days; and he begat Coriantum, and Coriantum dwelt in captivity all his days... (Ether 10:30-31)

Another place where the seams show, although not very clearly, is in Kemal's previous discovery of the ancient civilization on which the Atlantis legend was based, and the life of a man called Yewesweder who survived the destruction of his people by flood, and whose experiences were gradually transformed into the Biblical account of Noah. It's an interesting story, and it is carefully seamed into the greater whole of Pastwatch (the connection: Yewesweder's civilization was the first to invent the concept of slavery), but there was a quality about it that felt tangential, as though the whole tale could have been excised without significant damage to the rest of the book. From a cursory reading of the author's notes, I knew that this book took Card considerably more time to finish than he'd anticipated, and that he left his publishers hanging a long time before it finally came to press. Could this section of the book have come from a short story he'd written earlier, or a piece of another book he'd started and never finished, as a way of padding out the novel?

Actually, yes. From the copyright page:

This novel includes a summary of the novella "Atlantis," copyright © 1992, published in Grails: Quests, Visitations and Occurrences, ed. by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg and Edward E. Kramer.

So a novella published four years earlier becomes part of a later novel. And though Card does a very good job weaving it into a greater story, there are still places where the seams show.

Finally, there is another kind of seam, though one much more difficult to detect: the way Card's personal faith affects the choices of his characters. Card is a staunch believer in the teachings and divinity of Jesus Christ, and his belief system shapes the course of his novel through the use of characters making painful personal sacrifices to achieve a greater goal.

[SPOILERS AHEAD DANGER WARNING AHOOGA]

Tagiri, the woman who decides to stop Christopher Columbus from bringing slavery to the New World, undergoes a psychological journey where she experiences a very deep change of heart. From her passionate determination to stop the horror and injustice of slavery, she becomes enmeshed in a project designed to change the past -- and in so doing, she is made aware not only of the doomed future of her own timeline, but the very strong probability that changing the past will create a time paradox that will cause her, all potential future generations, and all the past generations back to 1492, never to have existed. Tagiri therefore has to make a terrible choice for her entire timeline: do nothing and potentially doom humanity to extinction, or send people back to fix the past and wipe out the very existence of billions of people, including herself. Although she is never described as a Christian, her agonized decision to make the necessary sacrifice to salvage mankind's future defines Tagiri as a type of Christ figure.

Likewise, the three people chosen to go back into the past also function as Christ figures. Not only do they sacrifice the continuity of their lives in the past and sever their connection to their entire society, but Hunahpu and Diko choose to sacrifice the love that has grown between them, and Kemal literally lays down his life for the cause. All three participants, though working separately, are united by a single goal: to make both the Old and New Worlds kinder, more tolerant of others, and more authentically Christian.

(A tiny bit of irony: by creating a timeline in which more people are true Christians, Card may have caused another kind of paradox. A timeline wherein Christian beliefs prevail would probably be one in which the Protestant Reformation would not need to occur, and thus a timeline in which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would never have come into being. Thus Card's personal beliefs, strongly influenced by Mormon doctrine, helped him to craft a fictitious timeline in which Mormonism probably wouldn't exist. Weirdness reigns in science fiction!)

[OK SPOILERS OVER YOU CAN COME BACK NOW]

Now, does any of this seam detection detract from Pastwatch as a novel? Not to my way of thinking. As I wrote above, it's a great read. And just because it's possible to see the seams in a story doesn't make the story any less worthy of your time. In fact, in some ways, being able to see where the sections of the story came from and how they coalesced creates a greater understanding and enjoyment of the whole -- like looking over the pieces of fabric in a patchwork quilt, being able to identify the places where they came from, and appreciating the overall beauty and comfort of the quilt all the more because you happen to have a bit of the inside story.

Bishop Hatto and the Mouse-Tower

For a good year now, I've been enjoying (and occasionally using) the wealth of public-domain images that the British Library has generously shared via its Flickr account. The best thing about browsing images and text in the public domain is when you come across a forgotten gem. I found one of these today: the folk tale of Hatto II, Archbishop of Mainz, and his Mäuseturm (Mouse Tower) on the Rhine. In the tale, Hatto was a cruel despot who used his power as both bishop and prince to mistreat the common people of his area; during a famine in 974, when the grain had run out, the people went to the bishop looking for food. What he did to them, and what happened next, was immortalized in the following poem by Robert Southey (with illustrations by V. H. Darwin -- who seems to be a distant cousin of Charles Darwin).

Warning to musophobes: you might want to skip this one.

Bishop Hatto: a legend of the Mouse-Tower on the Rhine

The Summer and Autumn had been so wet,
That in Winter the corn was growing yet,
'Twas a piteous sight to see all round
The grain lie rotting on the ground.

Every day the starving poor
Crowded around Bishop Hatto's door,
For he had a plentiful last year's store,
And all the neighbourhood could tell,
His granaries were furnish'd well.

At last, Bishop Hatto appointed a day
To quiet the poor without delay;
He bade them to his great barn repair,
And they should have food for the Winter there.

Rejoiced at such tidings good to hear,
The poor folk flocked from far and near;
The great barn was full as it could hold
Of women and children, and young and old.

Then when he saw it could hold no more,
Bishop Hatto he made fast the door,
And while for mercy on Christ they call,
He set fire to the barn, and burnt them all.

"I'faith, 'tis an excellent bonfire!" quoth he,
"And the country is greatly obliged to me
For ridding it, in these times forlorn
Of rats, that only consume the corn."

So then to his palace returned he,
And he sat down to supper merrily,
And he slept that night like an innocent man,
But Bishop Hatto never slept again.

In the morning, when he entered the hall,
Where his picture hung against the wall,
A sweat like death all over him came,
For the rats had eaten it out of the frame.

As he looked, there came a man from his farm,
And he had a countenance white with alarm,
"My Lord, I opened your granaries this morn,
And the rats had eaten all your corn."

Another came running presently,
And he was pale as pale could be,
"Fly, my Lord Bishop, fly," quoth he,
"Ten thousand rats are coming this way,
The Lord forgive you for yesterday!"

"I'll go to my tower on the Rhine," replied he,
"'Tis the safest place in Germany;
The walls are high, and the shores are steep,
And the stream is strong, and the water deep."

Bishop Hatto fearfully hastened away,
And he crossed the Rhine without delay,
And reached his tower, and barred with care
All the windows, doors, and loopholes there.

He laid him down and closed his eyes,
But soon a scream made him arise,
He started, and saw two eyes of flame
On his pillow, from whence the screaming came.

He listened and looked: it was only the cat,
But the Bishop he grew more fearful for that,
For she sat screaming, mad with fear
At the army of Rats, that was drawing near.

For they have swum over the river so deep,
And they have climbed the shore so steep,
And now by thousands up they crawl
To the holes and windows in the wall.

Down on his knees the Bishop fell,
And faster and faster his beads did he tell,
As louder and louder drawing near
The saw of their teeth without he could hear.

And in at the windows, and in at the door,
And through the walls by thousands they pour,
And down through the ceiling, and up through the floor,
From the right and the left, from behind and before,
From within and without, from above and below,
And all at once to the Bishop they go.

They have whetted their teeth against the stones,
And now they pick the Bishop's bones,
They gnawed the flesh from every limb,
For they were sent to do judgment on him.

So isn't that fun? Not as jolly as being nibbled to death by ducks, but it makes for a good story. (Completely without historical basis, mind you, but as Jan Harold Brunvand might say, that's never stopped people from repeating a good story before.)

Books books books

Well, I've been through a full course of antibiotics (Zithromax! When you have to nuke the ick from orbit just to be sure!) and I'm still hoarse and hacking, although it seems to be fading away... too gradually for my tastes, but at least I'm getting better.

Also, all the time spent in bed over the Christmas holidays meant lots of opportunities for uninterrupted reading. I've finished off five books since Christmas and am reading four more. As I get older I'm finding it easier to zigzag between several books at a time. When I was younger I had a hard time reading several books in tandem, especially if they were all fiction; the narratives had a confusing tendency to blend together in my head. These days I've figured out the secret: read books with disparate themes, and throw at least one nonfiction work into the mix. There's no danger of mixing together the texts of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll and Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future; even though they're all nonfiction, they're different enough in subject matter (memoir, biography, future predictions) that it's easy to keep all the texts separate in my head. Which is good, because I'm still a little woozy from the NyQuil.

Speaking of woozy, a random thought which occurred to me while reading: why are most printed books published in portrait format (that is, with pages taller than they are wide)? Why don't we have more square books, or landscape-printed texts (most image-saturated "coffee-table books" are printed in landscape format)? Does it have something to do with the way our brains process the written word, or is it cheaper to print that way, or does it have to do with the way printers used to fold a sheet of paper to make folios and quartos, or is it just "the way it's always been done"? The format is being perpetuated on e-readers such as Kindle, and it makes me wonder why we do it that way.

Silverlock syndrome and "The Fault In Our Stars"

So, yesterday I read the copy of The Fault In Our Stars that's been floating around the house ever since V finished it.

Huh.

How to describe my thoughts... oh, hey, I know. Silverlock syndrome.

Back in the mid-to-late-'80s, I picked up a paperback reprint of a book called Silverlock, written by one John Myers Myers (apparently a man so nice they named him twice). Silverlock, originally published in 1949, is the story of a wholly apathetic jerk named A. Clarence Shandon who is shipwrecked and washes up on the shores of the Commonwealth, a place where characters from literature live and breathe and conduct their various adventures. But it took me a while to get to that point, because the paperback copy of Silverlock I picked up had something on the order of 15 PAGES of rave reviews, including forewords by the likes of such science fiction greats as Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, before I even hit Chapter 1. And everyone who had read Silverlock seemed to agree, repeatedly and with gusto, that I was in for a treat. Phrases like "Lucky you" and "You'll get drunk on Silverlock" primed me to absolutely love this book.

I've never finished Silverlock. I just couldn't make myself continue. After all the raves that had been heaped upon it, the actual book was just... so-so. I kept expecting to fall in love with it, with one of its characters or the setting of the Commonwealth, but as I pressed on A. Clarence Shandon and his friends from all corners of classic fantasy literature just kept failing to wow me, and eventually I left off in the middle of a chapter and never returned to the book. The genre into which Silverlock best fits had no proper name when the book was first published, but it's now called fanfiction, and I've seen better writing and better treatment of similar concepts in dozens of fan-created stories.

Had I come across Silverlock on my own, without any glowing introductions by famous authors or squeeing fanboy praise by various book reviewers, I might have been able to enjoy it on its own merits. But I couldn't. And having browsed an online excerpt from the book just before I wrote this (on the off chance that my literary tastes have changed dramatically since age 16), I stand by my original observation: the idea is far better as a concept than in its execution, and in any case it would be a rare book indeed that could actually support the reams of praise that have been heaped upon this one. Silverlock syndrome describes any book whose reputation exceeds it.

And that's about where I stand with The Fault In Our Stars. To be fair to John Green, it's more compelling writing than Silverlock, because I actually finished the book. The teen characters are sometimes overly pretentious, sometimes wildly precocious, with a quality I usually attribute to Joss Whedon's writing (in other words, the dialogue isn't realistic, but it's charming enough that you wish people really would talk that way). The subject matter is difficult -- being young, witty and terminally cancerous usually isn't a festival of fun -- and there are places where the plot strains credibility. I know, I'm expecting a lot from a YA novel. Then again, I expected so much largely because the book has been drastically overhyped. Critics and fans have swooned and babbled over it. The dust jacket of this copy is plastered with praises. Everywhere I go online I seem to get an eyeful of teen girls tweeting things like "just finished TFIOS OMG AUGUSTUSSSSS!!!!1!1!!!! WHAT IS LIFE I CAN'T EVEN", etc., so Mr. Green has definitely reached his target demographic.

It never once made me cry. To borrow a bit from the book itself: "It all felt Romantic, but not romantic." And it's not because I have a heart of stone. I get weepy over patriotic songs, for heaven's sake. I bawled like an infant near the end of The Book Thief. I had a relative who lost a leg to cancer. But this book, which has turned other readers into soggy wet messes, did not reach me where I live. I don't know. Maybe enough characters were spending so much of the latter half of this book crying already that I didn't feel much need to join them.

Have you read The Fault In Our Stars? Agree that it's been overhyped? Think I'm smoking crack? Let me know.

Seduced by SF

It's pretty safe to say we like our science fiction around here. But that wasn't always the case for me.

Yeah, I'll pause to let that sink in: I've always been fond of fantasy, but I didn't start out liking science fiction. Surprise, surprise.

In my defense, my first introduction to SF was through short story reprints in Boys' Life magazine, which my two brothers subscribed to back in their Scouting days. (They were frequently annoyed by their older sister stealing their magazine to read the stories.) Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein and their ilk were all right, I supposed, but they didn't invoke for me that sense of wonder so many fans report feeling on their first brush with the genre. Looking back on it, I sought out character development in my favorite stories, and some of those classic pulp tales barely sketched out characters so they could focus almost exclusively on the science end of things. In my mind, it was important to care about people first before you could get excited about their adventures. I much preferred the serialization of John Christopher's Tripods series, which seemed to do a better job of giving Will, Henry and Beanpole the human touch.

So for a long time I dropped the genre of science fiction almost completely from my reading, assuming that it just wasn't my cup of tea. (Yes, of course I read Ray Bradbury during this period -- as much as I could find, in fact. But most of Bradbury's creative output was fantasy, fictionalized memoirs, "weird tales" or soft SF. Bradbury himself freely admitted in interviews that he didn't write much science fiction. In fact, he considered Fahrenheit 451 to be his only novel that came anywhere near hard SF.) I was also told time and again by teachers and other adults that science fiction was the literary equivalent of junk food, and that I was better off reading high-quality literature rather than wasting my time on mindless pulp.

Then, in high school, I met Brad. Brad was a kindred spirit and a voracious reader, but unlike me, he'd fully embraced science fiction -- and he made frequent, enthusiastic recommendations of the stuff he was reading. He'd been spelunking in the stacks at the Provo Library and had come across a short story collection (I think it was The Anything Box) by a writer I'd never heard of, one Zenna Henderson, and he couldn't stop talking about it. Finally I told him I'd look into her stuff, just for the sake of changing the subject.

A few days later, at lunchtime, I nonchalantly made my way into the H section of the fiction shelves at the Provo High School library. Although they had no copy of The Anything Box, I did see a few books with "Henderson" on the spine. I randomly slid one off the shelf, and here's what met my eyes:

...oh no.

Oh no oh no oh no.

There was no freaking way I was going to check this book out of the high school library. I mean, a farmer and his wife and a flying saucer on the cover? Complete. Social. Suicide. I was already awkward and unsure of myself, and I didn't need this book to help my classmates confirm that I was a total dweeb.

Well, maybe I'd just sit down, read a few pages and see. Maybe it wasn't that good.

I read a few pages. And frankly, at first it wasn't that good -- this deeply depressed and angsty young girl taking the bus out to the middle of nowhere to do away with herself -- and then, as I continued... I felt something stir in my head and chest... and I kept reading and pretty soon the bell rang and I had to go to class and I didn't want to put it down. But the words social suicide kept echoing in my head, so I slid the book back onto the shelf and sprinted to my next class.

The next two weeks or so I came home from school starving, because I skipped the cafeteria to spend my entire lunch hour (well, half-hour) curled in an obscure corner of the library with a small paperback whose cover I hid assiduously, because a) I still couldn't summon the nerve to check it out and b) I had to know what happened next. And when I got to the end of the book, I proceeded to plow through every other book by Zenna Henderson on the library shelves. And when I'd worked through all those, I went to Pioneer Book and looked for more.

Yes, I know. Zenna Henderson's work is still somewhat obscure, it's dated, it's considered very soft SF, and the interstitial tale that ties the stories together in Pilgrimage isn't very well-written. But her writing was my gateway drug. After that I stopped shying away from SF as a genre. In so doing I began finding authors like Connie Willis and Greg Bear and Nancy Kress and Michael Flynn and numerous others who wrote strong, compelling characters first and happened to put them in science fiction settings. And I also discovered that not all science fiction was serious, as I read Douglas Adams and others who wrote SF and space opera with a lot of goofy humor.

By the time I met Captain Midnight, I was well on the way to becoming a science fiction junkie. And that's partly how he lured me in -- he lent me books from his copious SF collection to read, and then asked me what I thought of them. (Clever man.)

When I write, I'm still drawn to writing fantasy. That's because I don't have a strong background in the hard sciences and I doubt my ability to write believable science fiction. But when I read, I no longer discriminate by genre. As long as it's a good tale, at least reasonably well-written and comes recommended by friends or other readers whose opinions I trust, I'll dive in. And thus I've learned that people who dismiss science fiction as cheap pulp work probably haven't read anything in the genre since 1955. Yes, there's still a lot of bad writing; Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction author himself, famously admitted that "ninety percent of SF is crud," but then went on to aver that ninety percent of everything else is crud as well. The adventure of reading a new book is the possibility of discovering that elusive ten percent, the stuff that jolts your brain with explosions of beauty and wonder.

Ngh. bleh.

Feeling super ugly today. (Hey, we've all got those days, right?) My fabulous sister Jenny says that on days like this you should make a special effort to look good, to give your flagging self-esteem a little visual boost. I've read suggestions from other people that you should go out and do something you really enjoy -- go to a museum or see a movie or visit one of your favorite places in nature. Still others suggest getting in some exercise. I dunno.

I did try one thing -- since I love libraries and don't visit them nearly as often as I once did, I stopped by the Lake Hills branch around noon and just read for an hour. Even if I still feel kinda fea, it was peaceful and quiet and I got to escape into the world of the book for a while.

So, Sooz, whatcha reading these days?

Glad you asked.

Recently finished:

People have been recommending Markus Zusak's The Book Thief since it was first released, but I've been poky about picking it up. Then I spied a cheap copy at Half Price Books, and there was no longer any good excuse to put off reading it.

The book has an odd conceit: it's narrated by Death, a world-weary yet undying entity whose interminable job it is to collect and gently carry the souls of the dead to their final rest. And although Death is constantly moving all around the world to gather up souls, trying to ignore the grim specifics of the job, occasionally a human being comes along whose life experiences make their mark even on Death. Such is the case with Liesel Meminger, a young German girl who first encounters Death when her six-year-old brother Werner expires of a coughing fit on a train bound for Munich. Through the circumstances of his hurried burial, Liesel finds and surreptitiously takes a book, The Gravedigger's Handbook, with her as a way of keeping Werner's memory alive. With the help of her new foster father, she painstakingly makes her way through the book, which improves her ability to read. Liesel grows up in the Munich suburb of Molching, finding and spiriting away other books -- from a private collection, from a book-burning, anywhere she might happen to discover them -- and developing a deep hunger for their contents. At several points in the narrative she connects again with Death, who has become curiously attached to the girl, wondering about her fate.

Few young adult books about Nazi Germany have anything positive to say about the German people as a whole. But as has been pointed out before, the first people Hitler ever conquered were the Germans. Some characters are depicted as True Believers in the Third Reich, but the majority simply keep their heads down, trying to care for themselves and their families as they wait out the blackness of the current political storm. In addition to crafting some very believable, likable characters, the author does an excellent job of depicting the pervasiveness of Nazism and its chilling everyday effect on rank and file Germans. While they never had to endure the well-documented horrors of the work camps, it doesn't mean that they didn't suffer. The writing is suffused with dark humor, symbolically rich, occasionally pretentious in style, but often lyrically beautiful -- and by the end of the book (appropriately enough, finished on the morning of Halloween) I was reduced to a weepy mess.

(edited) Finished 29 November:

I picked up Newton's Wake: A Space Opera from the library, on the recommendation of my pharmacist after we started talking about SF (have I mentioned recently how much I love living in the swirling vortex of SF fandom that is Western Washington? Well, it bears repeating). The book required a little mental gearshifting before I could get comfortable with the storyline; Ken MacLeod, like many SF writers, tosses his readers into the deep end of the universe he's created and expects them to tread water and pay attention until they figure it all out.

The book begins some time after a singularity event referred to as the Hard Rapture, somewhat reminiscent of the Skynet scenario, where American AIs first became fully sentient with near-godlike powers and started wiping out humanity. Most of the remnant that survived were Europeans and Asians who fled Earth, banding together as colonies or organizations, while others stayed to fight the Raptured. Some human flight from Earth was fueled by FTL starships, while others made use of the skein, a kind of wormhole network known as Carlyle's Drift after the Glasgow-based crime-syndicate family that discovered, exploited and effectively owns it. Death, in this milieu, is temporary for most; technology has advanced to the point that humans regularly back up their brains before going into danger, and if people die their mental backups are downloaded into reconstituted physical bodies, effectively creating an immortal society. But human backups without physical bodies can also be used as "familiars" (read: slaves), in thrall to their masters for a predetermined period of time (one such thrall, Professor Isaac Shlaim, is described as one of the people who caused the Hard Rapture in the first place).

Lucinda Carlyle, the primary protagonist, is exploring the skein as part of a process known as "combat archaeology," making (often violent) contact with leftover Hard Rapture tech, when she accidentally comes across a previously-unknown remnant of humans on a planet called Eurydice; lots of plot-twisty intrigue ensues.

MacLeod demonstrates a playful sense of humor (one group that survived by largely rejecting tech is called "America Offline," and another corporation, which holds huge copyright backlogs, is referred to colloquially as "the Mouse" -- a nice jab at Disney's current efforts to become the grey goo of entertainment). However, most of his pop culture references feel overly dated, referring largely to events in the 1990s, and he seems to have a difficult time developing his characters, especially when it comes to realistic dialogue. (I can empathize; creating believable character dialogue is by far the hardest part of writing.)

It's also a little frustrating when you realize that an author has created a universe with an interesting back history and potentially fascinating tech, but has chosen not to tell the story his readers hoped for; we get a tantalizing glimpse of the beliefs, behaviors and mores of a society where immortality is possible -- our protagonist has an almost visceral bias against prosthetics, against people whose memories are incomplete and had to be reconstructed from history and hearsay, and a fear of experiencing her own death even if it's only temporary -- but MacLeod devotes very little time to following through, seeming to prefer to focus on the overwrought theatrical productions of a Eurydicean playwright instead. It would have been interesting to see in greater detail the horrors of the Hard Rapture up close and personal, rather than obliquely, or to see how the varied pockets of humanity, with their very different moral belief systems (I'm still giggling at "Latter-day Adventists"), ping up against each other. The writing gets more vague during the final third of the book, and the motivations of different characters become more difficult to follow just at the point where things ought to become a lot more clear; there are also a few stray plot threads where Chekhov's gun never goes off.  In some ways it feels like MacLeod bit off more plot than he could chew for a book of this length. With all that said, Newton's Wake is at its best an engaging read, with a raft of interesting ideas for later cogitation.

(edited) Finished 25 January:

My friend Laurence tore through D.J. MacHale's SYLO at superhuman speed. She then recommended it to Carrie, who in turn reports that she read it overnight. Since we've just started a virtual SF/F book group on Facebook and we needed an inaugural title to read and discuss, this turned out to be it.

This book is difficult to classify, especially since it seems to be entry #1 in a YA trilogy. It might be a straightforward government-paranoia thriller, or it might be something else. Spaceship-style craft appear, but are they alien in origin or do they come from somewhere closer to home? People are mysteriously dropping dead on a small island off the coast of Maine, but is it an unknown virus or the result of overconsumption of a strange crystalline substance? And what precisely is SYLO, the military group that arrives to blockade the entire island and uses deadly force to prevent anyone from leaving? The book raises a lot more questions than it answers, presumably to get readers to buy the next installment.

The story is fast-paced and intense, if relatively simplistic (this is a YA novel, after all), with an indifferent writing style. But I'm not sure that lack of style is going to matter much to the target audiences. It bothered me enough that I took a few months to finish the book, because although the story was interesting, the first-person voice (of protagonist Tucker Pierce) was not. I had a difficult time empathizing with Tucker or his problems; the character came across as so bland that he simply didn't provide a compelling reason to keep reading. In many ways this book would have been a better read if the protagonist had been Tori Sleeper, the lobsterman's daughter who is Tucker's love interest.

We'll be discussing this book on the book group shortly. I get the feeling I'm going to be holding the minority viewpoint.

An addition to the van Gogh list

Earlier this year I first floated the idea of the van Gogh list -- creating a list of living people whose contributions to the world you especially appreciate, so they can be aware of the positive influence they have been in others' lives.  Sadly, my personal van Gogh list has been diminished with the passing of Ray Bradbury, and today it occurred to me that another person should be added to the list (actually, several other people should be on the list, but all in good time).

Here's the newest entry:

Gerald McDermott

(photo credit: author's website)

I come from a family of readers, but also from a family of artists and illustrators.  The practical upshot of this was that my siblings and I devoured picture books when we were children -- and we favored books with illustrations so colorful and richly detailed as to be a feast for the eyes.  There were many favorites around our house -- Baba Yaga by Blair Lent, The Blue Bird by Fiona French, Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola, and all manner of titles by Ed Emberley, Richard Scarry, Mercer Mayer, Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel and Trina Schart Hyman -- but my favorite picture book as a child, bar none, was Anansi the Spider by Gerald McDermott.  If you grew up in the 1970s, there's a good chance you read one of Mr. McDermott's books, saw at least one of his short animated films in school, or watched one of several short pieces he made for the PBS television series The Electric Company.  Mr. McDermott started his career as an animator, and his illustrations -- especially in his earliest books, such as Anansi, which were adapted from the short films he created -- reflect a strong animation aesthetic, with highly geometric character designs, often supersaturated with color and with a distinct sense of movement.  His work is visually unique, it is respectful of folk tradition, and it is beautiful.

Never seen one of his films before?  Well, then, here's your chance (thanks, YouTube!):

The children's book section of our family library is full of McDermott titles picked up over the years. I only wish someone would remaster all his short films -- The Stonecutter, Sun Flight, Anansi the Spider, The Magic Tree, Arrow to the Sun -- and some of his Electric Company shorts, and put them all on one DVD. I'd buy that thing so fast it'd make your head spin.

NOTE: I am very sorry to report that Gerald McDermott passed away on December 26, 2012 at the age of 71.

Summer magic

In 1982, the summer after Dad died, all the kids in my family were farmed out to aunts and uncles in the Bay Area so that Mom could travel out of state to take a teaching class in preparation for re-entering the workforce.  I ended up staying with my Aunt Marcia and Uncle John in Oakland.

My Aunt Marcia's house was the first really magical place I'd ever encountered outside of books.  There were other places I'd seen that seemed to be magic -- Disneyland, for instance, or Children's Fairyland in Oakland -- but these places were more "plaster magic" than real magic.  As cool as it looked, nobody really lived in Fairyland.  It was all artificial.  Everything was made of plaster over chicken wire, or concrete painted to look like a Chinese dragon or Alice down the rabbit hole.  But Aunt Marcia's house had true magic to it, because it was real.  The magic had an almost casual matter-of-fact quality to it -- not mundane, but accepted as part of daily life -- that delighted me.

It wasn't even really a house -- well, not a whole house anyway, but part of one.  In the Piedmont section of Oakland where Aunt Marcia lived, old mansions were routinely subdivided to create smaller apartments for families who could afford them.  I'm not sure how much more "affordable" this really made them -- Piedmont, after all, remains an affluent community -- but I do know the division of these huge houses created the most marvelous living space, all on a single floor.

To reach the front door, one had to climb a slightly rickety wooden staircase attached to the side of the house.  The owner seemed to have slapped on this separate entrance to the second floor as an afterthought, but Aunt Marcia turned it into a grand entry, brave with plants and flags and wind bells.

The apartment was rectangular, more or less shoebox-shaped.  The hall ran the long way down the center of the space and was covered in diagonally-slanted wood paneling, full of knots and spirals.  Just left of the front door was the kids' room; to the right was Aunt Marcia and Uncle John's room.  A bit further down, the hallway opened up into an all-purpose hub where Aunt Marcia kept her fridge -- there was no room for it in the tiny kitchen.  To the left of this hub there were two doors, one leading into a storage space and the other a set of stairs to the apartment on the next floor.  Aunt Marcia used this stairwell as her personal closet, with dresses strung on clothesline and shoes paired up on the stairs.  To the right of the hub was a long, skinny bathroom, sleek with black-and-white Art Deco tile, and just past it was the long, cramped galley kitchen, which at one time might have been a walk-in closet.

After all this, one walked through an archway into the showpiece room of the house -- a combination living and dining room, with a huge bay window to the right, looking out on the sunset and other grand homes further down the hill.  Before the bay window was a cozy window seat, covered with luxurious cushions in various shapes and sizes -- an opulence I thought of as Turkish -- and hung from strings in the window were scores of crystal prisms, like a rain of solid tears.  At sunset the whole room came alive with shimmering rainbows.

Aunt Marcia's house was a house of ice cream and incense, of homemade borscht and brass candlesticks, of washing one's hands with Bee & Flower sandalwood soap, of taking elegant cups of herb tea from orphan china cups fetched from the glass-fronted wood cabinet to one side of the dining table.  My cousin Josh, all of four years old at the time with a raspy-sweet little boy voice, would play superhero games in the huge terraced back yard, his homemade Batman cape streaming out behind him.  On cold and foggy mornings we'd play the Muppet version of The Frog Prince on an LP record in the living room.  (The phrase "If I could only bake the hall in the candle of her brain..." got stuck in my head, and remained there for years.)

That summer was the first time I ever read Dandelion Wine.  I'd already fallen in love with Ray Bradbury in school, but this was something new to me, different from his tales of Mars and burning books and fantastic European uncles with green wings -- this was written from the point of view of a twelve-year-old, which I happened to be at the time.  Reading the book seemed to reignite the life in me, something I needed desperately after the previous six months or so of sleepwalking through existence, taking little interest in anything and subconsciously waiting for Dad to return and make everything all right.  He couldn't, of course, but the linked tales of the Spaulding boys and their varying summer adventures in Green Town, Illinois were just the thing I needed to start knitting the ragged edges of my heart back together.

One Sunday my aunt took me to the Berkeley street fair, which was filled with rainbows and soap bubbles and diverse marvels for sale.  I loved it.  I had no money to buy anything; in a single-parent household with six kids, there's no such thing as allowance money, so the only cash I had came from the occasional babysitting job, where I typically made between $1 and $2 an hour.  But I breathed it all in, knowing full well that I couldn't buy any of it, but content just to see what amazing things people were selling.

Bookbag image by Kim Laustrup. Used with permission.

It was at the Berkeley fair that Aunt Marcia surprised me with the gift of a black canvas bag screen-printed with gold unicorns, which I used as a school bookbag from junior high onward.  I was convinced it was lucky, and wouldn't part with it.  By my senior year of high school it was severely tattered, with holes in the bottom corners, and the handles had been replaced twice.  I ceremonially burned it in the fire pit of a city park on the morning after I graduated.  (I would often burn formerly cherished things as a way of separating my life into neat compartments.  Once I burned a whole manila folder of unfinished stories just before I got married, knowing I would never complete them.)

It's been thirty years since that summer.  In the time since I've been fortunate enough to see a great many more marvelous things, a fair share of which I'd recognize as magical.  But whenever someone describes something as "magic" now, from somewhere in the back of my head comes a cozy memory of a twelve-year-old girl curled up in the cushions of the window seat, reading delicious stories, while old jazz standards play in the background and the afternoon sun shines through to fill the room with rainbows.  That's my magic.

Dying for some fun: "The Hunger Games" and violence as entertainment

Mockingjay pin image courtesy of the Freshly Popped blog

NOTE: minor spoilers ahead for those who have not yet read the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, or seen the film of the same name. Proceed with caution.
FURTHER NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS: If you steal ideas from this article to write your term paper, I will happily narc on you to any teacher or professor who contacts me. Plagiarists suck. The end.

It seems as though I'm always the last holdout to jump on the pop culture bandwagon. (There were three Harry Potter titles in print before I could be convinced to pick up the series -- however reluctantly -- but I went from indifferent to obsessed very quickly.) In keeping with that tendency, although The Hunger Games has been a huge hit in the YA fiction world since 2008, I just finished reading it a few days ago. I have to say it's well worth the read. Although simply told, it is a symbolic, visceral and compelling story, a cautionary tale that manages not to be heavy-handed in its didacticism, due in part to its being told from a specific point of view.

The film version of the book opened yesterday. I haven't seen it yet, but early reviews have been mostly positive, although a large number of critics -- even the ones who gave it high marks -- are decrying the film for doing precisely what the book criticizes: using cruelty and violence as entertainment for the masses. They seem to have forgotten for the nonce that books are also mass media consumed for pleasure, although reading a book is a more intimate form of entertainment than watching a film in theaters, and that the original book also makes use of violence to draw in its readers.

But as much as critics and media pundits are squawking about depictions of death in a movie being marketed to teens, the real elephant in the room -- the one issue nobody seems to be bringing up -- is a fact far more uncomfortable than the violent content of The Hunger Games: it's nothing new. Public squeamishness over violence and cruelty as entertainment is a very recent development in human history. Individual humans may turn away from cruel acts, but our species as a whole has traditionally enjoyed watching fellow humans and other living beings as they suffer and die.

The name of the country in which the Hunger Games takes place -- Panem -- is meant to evoke the Latin phrase panem et circenses ("bread and circuses"), supposedly the only two things the citizens of the foundering Roman Republic cared about, as wily politicians pandered to their most basic desires to be fed and entertained. As the Republic declined into an Empire, Roman citizens blunted their fears of the future and got the thrills they craved from gladiatorial games in which the combatants bled and died, or spectacles in which Christians and other undesirables were fed to wild beasts. Public executions were also popular; at least some of the people who showed up at the Crucifixion probably did so for the entertainment value of jeering at the crucified.

The Middle Ages and Renaissance were likewise filled with violence as entertainment, as knights jousted and fought to the death in single combat. Animal blood sports such as bear-baiting, bull-baiting, dogfighting and hare coursing were also highly popular; certain breeds of dog such as the pit bull and the greyhound were bred specifically for such sports, and wagering on a particular animal was a common game of chance. There wasn't much difference in brutality between the Aztec Empire of Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistadores who penned detailed descriptions of human sacrifices. Renaissance England was supposedly an advanced culture, but English subjects in Shakespeare's time enjoyed gory public torture and execution of their fellow beings, including beheadings, drawing and quartering, gibbeting and burning at the stake. People crossing over London Bridge could take in the sight of the heads of executed criminals impaled on spikes, as a warning to other would-be traitors. And despite the noble goals of its famed philosophers, the Enlightenment fared no better in its fondness for violence -- as the French Revolution and its enthusiastic use of the guillotine made abundantly clear.

During the American Civil War it was not uncommon for people who lived near a battleground to pack picnic lunches and watch the carnage unfold from a safe distance as they ate. Public executions continued to be a form of popular entertainment in the 19th century, in the United States as well as in Europe. (The last public execution in the United States, a hanging, took place in 1936.)

These days people worry about movies, video games, even cartoons desensitizing children and teenagers through the use of simulated violence. But real violence is never far away. In my own lifetime, live footage from the Vietnam War has given way to filmed footage of jumpers on 9/11, videotape of jihadis beheading reporters on YouTube, and shock-and-awe bombardment of a capital city on the nightly news. Although we may not like to admit it about ourselves, as a species we are still fascinated by cruelty, by violence, by pain and death.

One interesting note about The Hunger Games is that the text of the book never justifies its title. Katniss Everdeen does not reveal why Panem's annual televised slaughters are called "the Hunger Games." But I think I know why. It's not because the people of the outer districts are never far from starvation, nor is it the "hunger" of the Tributes to survive the Games; it's something far more insidious. The look on the face of a serial killer closing in on a victim, the expression of a pedophile left alone with a child, has a dark and twisted similarity to the faces of people eagerly waiting for Thanksgiving dinner to be served. It is a look of pleasure in anticipation of what is about to come; it is, in short, a look of hunger about to be sated. Just as Panem -- bread -- fills the stomachs of the masses in the Capitol, its annual Hunger Games temporarily satiates their hunger for diversion, deviance and death.

There is, I believe, only one way for individuals to put aside this natural human taste for cruelty: by discovering and nurturing empathy and charity toward others. In the book Katniss observes the mindless prep team, assistants to Cinna the stylist, as "a trio of oddly colored birds"; she takes comfort in thinking of them as less than fully human, primarily because they are so self-focused as to be wholly indifferent to the suffering and death of the Tributes. This kind of behavior would be unsustainable on either side if we truly saw all our fellow human beings as our brothers and sisters. We could no longer derive any joy from the pain of other people if we thought of them the way Katniss thinks of her sister Prim: that we would be willing to put our own lives on the line to save them from peril.

"Betwixt two things": why the Bowdlerization of Huckleberry Finn hurts American literature and society

NOTE: If you are easily offended by bad words, proceed with caution.

It was a close place. I took [the paper] up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell" -- and tore it up.

--from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

I was raised in a household where racist epithets were forbidden. From the time I was tiny, I was taught that words used to refer to someone's race or national origin in a derogatory way were wrong, and that I would get in big trouble with my parents if I ever used them, in or out of their hearing.

There was a reason for it, of course. My parents were part of a generation that truly believed in and championed the phrase "all men are created equal." Their own parents -- products of their time, just as we are products of ours -- harbored a number of ideas colored by prejudice. My maternal grandfather, who had fought in World War II, was deeply distrustful of all Asians, but especially of Japanese people; my paternal grandmother, who had been raised in the South, carried the belief that whites were superior to all other races. To their credit, Mom and Dad did not want to perpetuate these beliefs in the next generation. And so, as part of their teaching and with the idea that the use of negative words engenders negative attitudes, they never used racist epithets themselves and forbade us to use them, just as they forbade swearing and obscenity in our home.

During my teens, I was appalled to hear one of my high school classmates refer casually to "that little nigger boy" who was featured in a popular commercial. She seemed oblivious to the offensiveness of the word she had chosen, so I gave her a verbal dressing-down, telling her that word was unacceptable and she was never to use it in my presence again. She seemed more annoyed with me than abashed at her word choice, but I really didn't care. The word was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, and I couldn't hold my peace and let it be used while I was in earshot.

A few days ago I read that publisher NewSouth Books intends to release an omnibus volume of two Mark Twain novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in February -- but with a twist. Noting the many times that Huck Finn has been banned in schools due to its repeated use of a racist epithet, NewSouth has edited the texts to remove "the N-word" and replace it with the word "slave"; likewise, the epithet "Injun" has been edited and replaced with the presumably less-offensive "Indian." These changes, they believe, will make Huck Finn acceptable in schools again and allow it to resume its rightful place in the Western canon.

I hate "the N-word." It's an ugly, vile word, and I flinch when I hear it used. And yet I am dead set against these editorial changes. In my opinion, nothing could be more stupid than to modify Twain's words.

Why? What would propel me to defend this position, knowing how much I despise the use of racist epithets in general and this one in particular?

As with most such questions, there's more than one good answer.

First, I happen to believe that Bowdlerization -- alteration or expurgation of a work in order to make it more suitable to a specific audience -- is harmful to classic literature. (If you're unfamiliar with the word's origins, you might want to take a quick gander at the Thomas Bowdler article on Wikipedia.) Though most previous attempts to clean up the classics were, like the NewSouth version of Huck Finn, made with the best of intentions, they often did more harm than good. Editing a classic book to make it more palatable to modern readers is a bit like painting eyebrows on the Mona Lisa to give her more character; not only is it a jaw-droppingly presumptuous act, but it does great and potentially irreparable damage to the original work. In any case, book editors do not have a great track record of being able to discern an author's intent; perhaps editors should adopt the Hippocratic oath of "First, do no harm."

Huck Finn is, among other things, an example of American historical fiction, and a number of commentators have pointed out that Twain deliberately set out to write Huck Finn as a product of his time and place. In that time and that place, a poor uneducated boy such as Huck would probably use non-standard English, and he does. Huck almost always says "knowed" instead of "knew," "ain't" instead of "isn't" and "warn't" instead of "weren't" -- and he uses the word "nigger" instead of "Negro," the more respectful term of that time. The use of this word in the antebellum South is a simple fact, as honest as Twain's recognition of the common practice of slavery itself. It is of a piece with the rest of Huck's dialect, and it hardly makes sense to clean this language up when Twain took such pains to make each character's dialect as historically accurate as possible (he even took the time to write an explanatory note in the preface about the dialects used in the book).

There are a number of other attempts to explain why changing racist language in Huck Finn would be a bad idea, but to my mind they all pale in comparison to the epiphany I had when I came across a particular passage near the end of the book. Huck has made it to Tom's Aunt Sally's house and is trying to come up with an excuse why his boat was delayed:

"It warn't the grounding -- that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head."

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt...."

When I read this passage, I felt sick to my stomach. I had finally gained a deeper understanding of why my parents had not allowed that word to be spoken in their home. Aunt Sally -- a character portrayed as sweet, gracious, loving, and the perfect example of Southern hospitality, a Christian woman and the wife of a preacher -- is able to blithely ignore the death of a fellow human being, treating the event with the same unconcern she might have for the death of a dog or a chicken, merely because Huck used the word "nigger" instead of "man." The epithet is evil because it diminishes the infinite worth of a human life to the near-worthlessness of a beast of burden, and it encourages even the good-hearted people of the story to look upon their fellow humans as disposable objects.

Twain was a master of satire who relished mocking the foibles of his society. In this one passage, Twain takes institutionalized racism and slavery to the woodshed in a way few authors have before or since. And if you substitute the word "nigger" with "slave" in this passage, it loses much of the deliberate knife-twisting Twain must have wanted his readers to feel. Because when you read this book and understand its many satirical jabs and cuts, you also understand that Twain wasn't trying to champion the use of the word he had Huck use so frequently. He was making it clear not only what an ugly word it was, but the lurking evil of casual racism it both signified and engendered in the society that used it.

Nowhere is this made clearer than in Twain's portrayal of Jim, the character to whom "the N-word" is most often attached. Jim is portrayed throughout the book as a complex and compelling man: intelligent, thoughtful, superstitious, funny, courageous and supremely loyal. He has his foibles and is imperfect, but he is also the closest thing to a father figure Huck has, keeping the boy as safe and protected as he can in the course of their journey down the river. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the life of a runaway slave in the South was forfeit to the merest whims of whites; if the white men around him had decided to kill Jim as a warning to other would-be runaway slaves, the only repercussions to them would have been having to compensate Jim's owner for her monetary loss. So much of this casual cruelty in antebellum Southern society is encapsulated by the use of the word "nigger."

Words mean things, and there is every indication that Twain chose his words carefully. (This is, after all, the same man who wrote, "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.") The word "slave," in this case, is the almost-right word -- and it does about the same thing as choosing to say "lightning bug" when what you really mean, what you really need to say, is "lightning." Yes, the continued use of Twain's original words might continue to make Huckleberry Finn into a lightning-rod of criticism for some time -- but that doesn't mean the answer is to appease the easily offended, some of whom have not read the book, let alone understood its underlying message.

I understand not everyone is going to agree with me. But if we are currently betwixt two things -- sticking to the original text despite criticism and book-banning, or altering the text to pacify those who do not understand it -- then I'm in favor of the former option, even if I do go to hell for it.

So, whatcha reading?

October, for obvious reasons, is an optimal time of year to read or re-read horror and suspense novels.

On the advice of The Internet, I picked up a completely unfamiliar book -- a book lauded as an unsung classic of modern horror fiction. (Though it can't have been that unsung, as it was a bestseller and was made into a feature film a few years after publication.)

Perhaps it's simply because it doesn't hold up to an unfair comparison (on which, see more below), but Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, though not an awful read by any means, was not everything I imagined it would be. The premise isn't bad, as horror novels go: little urban family rents a beautiful, if sadly dilapidated, grand house in the country for summer vacation, and they slowly come to discover there's an evil presence in the house which automatically rejuvenates it under just the right conditions.

The "evil house" concept has been used by more than one author to advantage, but that's not really the problem with this particular book. Here's the thing about writing psychological horror: if the terrifying conditions you've created are really going to dig into your readers' minds and make it impossible for them to put the book down, you must give them a compelling reason to care about the protagonists; your readers have to want desperately for the characters to make it out of the mess alive. And Marasco simply didn't take the time to make me care about anyone in the family. From the outset, one rarely gets the feeling that the husband and wife feel anything more than mild annoyance toward each other; Ben, the husband, is barely sketched out as a harried English teacher who may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Marian, the wife, is teasing and shallow, obsessed with acquiring beautiful objects. The two tend to ignore their son -- who is largely a cipher -- when they aren't actively traumatizing him. Aunt Elizabeth, who could have been a sassy old broad in the right author's hands, is little more than a cigarette holder and a paintbox. I followed these people with a kind of dull curiosity, wondering merely which one would die first and how the rest would be dispatched.

Then, too, there are a number of dead ends in this book -- cul-de-sac ideas that aren't properly followed up. Before finding the main house, the family comes upon a ruined summer cottage; the son swears he saw a three-wheeled bicycle covered in dried blood next to the place. At the house, the husband finds a set of broken glasses in the bottom of the pool; they don't belong to anyone in the family and the lenses are smashed in a way that suggests unusual violence. There's no spoiler in mentioning these plot points, because neither one has any follow-up in the story. I kept expecting the gory bicycle, in particular, to turn up again because the son has very little to do and is often bored; what would be more natural for him than to go exploring around the property, and maybe to find that bicycle again? But it never happens.

I know I'm not giving the book a fair shake, because I keep comparing it to this, which I re-read last week:

I first read this book in junior high, because a very kind English teacher recommended it to me. Some books which you read and love in your early teens become guilty pleasures later in life, because as you mature you realize the books weren't really very well-written at all.

I'll never say that about anything Shirley Jackson has written. Certainly I'll never say that about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which continues to be my favorite Jackson title. It's still remarkable; the eerie quality, the sense of something just out of one's vision being deeply wrong, does not fade with time or by comparison to other books. Even though Mary Katherine Blackwood narrates the book and we see everything that unfurls through her eyes, even though we sympathize with her at times, she is still in the end a foreign and fearsome being. The particular combination -- of disarming forthrightness with us, her readers, of making reference to singing cats, sympathetic magic rituals and claustrophobic rules and routines as though nothing could be more sensible, and of always keeping something back from us (Merricat never really regrets anything, never cries... or at least never lets us see her cry) -- adds up to one wholly unsettling little creature in an equally unsettling world.

Small moments of genius are visible throughout the book. Merricat's sister Constance seems relatively well-adjusted, but she never leaves the vicinity of her house -- and she goes upstairs to "wait" (read: hide) until the doctor has finished making his weekly visit to the invalid Uncle Julian. Uncle Julian himself is interesting to watch, especially when re-reading the book; I suspect there is a part of his foggy mind that knows more about the family catastrophe than he wants to admit, and he has routed around this knowledge, refusing to accept it, burying it under the trivia he collects endlessly for his unfinished book.

I read with some dismay that they're planning on making a movie out of We Have Always Lived in the Castle; I don't think it's possible to translate that peculiar unsettling quality to the big screen. Maybe some exceptionally deft and subtle director, with an equally deft and subtle stable of actors headed by a preternaturally gifted eighteen-year-old actress, will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.