Tag: books

Steph Swainston

An engaging rogue kept me going through the disorienting writing style. There are not one but two surreal worlds (and yes, I really mean surreal–I just looked it up). The end is also too abrupt for my taste; the major external drama is resolved, but not the internal or interpersonal ones.

Here it is at Powell’s Books.

An online list I subscribe to had a request for advice/stories about starting a reading group. Here’s the quick answer I gave:

I’ve participated in three startups. I’ll just describe each one briefly. The only universal is that none of them have used a discussion leader.

First group (and closest to my heart): Four friends, two of whom were newly dating, got together in a home over a meal and then discussed Kim. The group has been meeting for a meal in each other’s homes an average of ten times a year since 1988. The group made it through the early de facto but never formal departure of one of the founders, the partnership and later breakup of the couple, a period when it felt more like an eating group than a reading group, and the eventual departure of all but one of the founders. Two of the founders shepherded the group through its adolescence. Members pick books in rotation. Early rules were no poetry, no short stories. It’s always been a pretty low-key group. The best size seems to be around eight (since they need to fit around a dinner table), and members reflect a dispersed friendship network: New members come in at the invitation of a member after the member checks out the idea with the rest of the group. The kind of member in shortest supply: straight men. Next shortest supply: people who want to do “serious” reading for self-improvement. Since 2001 the group has been doing a fundraising readathon on MLK weekend, when they go away to a borrowed vacation home. You can find the list of books up through 2001, when I moved away, here: reading club.

Second group: New city, new employer, sent out a company-wide email. Got about five responses. We met three or four times and petered out. Our reasons for wanting a group differed too much; we lived too far away from each other to sustain meeting in one another’s homes but had no good alternative. There were no relationships that were close enough to sustain the group long enough for it to cohere.

Third try: Not-so-new city and employer. Sent out emails to work, Quaker meeting, and contra-dance community, as well as posting an invitation at an internet site. (Can’t remember the name of it. Reader’s roundtable? dunno.) Started with a large pool of casually interested people. It stymied me for quite a while because I didn’t want to be picking and choosing, but it was definitely more people than I wanted to be in a group with. Eventually they were winnowed out by questions of location, frequency, etc. There were probably fifteen people still around to be invited to participate in setting the first meeting. Five bowed out right away, and a couple more kind of kept their feet in but never showed up. We spent time the first night talking about what kind of books we’re interested in reading; verdict: mostly but not entirely fiction, one person doesn’t want to read “classics” (we’ll see how that pans out). We’re about to discuss our fourth book. We meet at a central location after work (6:30) and bring snack foods and beverages. We’re very spread out geographically, and the big hurdle I see facing us is what happens if we need to meet somewhere else. Current composition is a close Quaker friend and another Quaker I don’t know so well, two coworkers from my immediate office, another coworker from another department, a total stranger who responded to the internet listing, and my boyfriend. Two men, six women, age range mid-twenties to almost sixty. There are some close relationships, but not everyone knows one another. I’m organizing the meeting setups using evite.

Some things I’d suggest from what I’ve learned:

–Be clear as clear as you can with ourself about what you want if you’re going to be putting out the energy to get it started.
–Have something to sustain the group at first: a structure, putting yourself out to be the organizer, or a couple of strong friendships in the group.
–Get some diversity of perspective in the group.
–Decisions about food and location are just as important as decisions about what kind of books and whether to have leaders.

Good luck!

Bob has discovered Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels, and I started (re)reading along. I skipped the earliest (according to internal Darkover chronology) and have devoured these:

The Shattered Chain
Thendara House
Rediscovery (with Mercedes Lackey)
The Spell Sword

Yum. Tasty.

Just found the Invisible Library via an online book group that’s grown out of Copyediting‑L.

Andre Norton has died today. (via Waterboro Library Blog)

The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh was reviewed by Farah Mendelsohn over at the Inter-Galactic Playground, and I was intrigued. It’s a children’s book, an easy hour or two of reading, and it raises some interesting questions about what is valuable. It certainly suffers from its age.

Audrey Niffenegger. What a wonderful book, filled with longing. I want to go back and diagram all the little pieces to see if they really fit together the way they assert that they do, to find out if there are things we won’t know unless we put those pieces back together in a different order. What a wonderful accomplishment to write these lives in such a mixed-up order.

John Scalzi. A very fast hard sci-fi read. Humans are colonizing the galaxy, in competition with hundreds of other species. The seemingly universally violent contact between species is carried out by soldiers who are largely retirees who have been given new bodies. Not bad in terms of characterization and interesting relationships, but a big thumbs down on the simplistic treatment of what to expect from aliens and the reliance on preemptive violence.

Justina Robson. An engaging read, with some surprising character sympathies.

What will happen as mechanical, electronic, and genetic enhancements to the human body and mind become more common? What kind of class and power struggles will arise? Natural History asks these questions on an earth of the future where “unenhanced” humans who have created the “forged,” sterile, genetically manipulated, and physically and mentally enhanced servants. Slavery and justice are commented upon in a couple of political speeches, but I was disturbed by the idea that humanity, after all we’ve been through, would intentionally create a permanent, semi-human underclass.