Books!
I don't have the reading volume I once had, but read I do, so here's some particular favorites of the past few years, in no particular order.
The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik--After an adolescence of avid reading of Science Fiction (not Fantasy) I found I didn't care for most Cyberpunk and only a few hard SF writers have caught my interest: Elizabeth Moon and Lois McMaster Bujold. (And no, I don't read their fantasy, either. Just don't give a damn about quests and magic and destiny, sorry.) And Connie Willis, who is in a class by herself both because of her general excellence and wide-ranging subject matter. Then along came Naomi Novik's thrilling debut His Majesty's Dragon which combined my love of the Napoleonic era with Dragons in an alternate history in a setting akin to the Horatio Hornblower novels. Awesome! It may not be LITERATURE or HIGH ART, but the book was well-written and exciting and funny. I understood the setting and loved that it was done at least as well as your typical Regency romance writer gets it. She's got a theme running through the books on personal dignity and slavery that reminds you that below the swashbuckling and lovely dresses, a lot depended on servitude of many kinds to make the world work. (And I would like to assert that these books are NOT fantasy--nothing magical happens, the dragons just are and brief explanations are provided about their biology to explain flight, fire breathing, etc. Their bond with their human handlers is imprinting, just like a duckling, nothing mystical about it at all.) Novik took time off to produce a baby, but has sent book 7 to her editor, so eventually there will be another installment.
Bill Bryson has written a lot of entertaining books, but his latest At Home has to be my favorite of the half-dozen or so that I've read. It's a scattershot history of domestic life, organized thematically by each room in his new home in England. So in the kitchen you learn about the history of stoves and meal preparation, in the parlor about upholstery, etc. I would love to see this book come out in an illustrated edition just as his Short History of Nearly Everything did. Over and over again as I read I wanted pictures!
Free for All by Don Borchert is a nitty-gritty account of life in a public library. Some of it is depressing--the homeless who hang out, adrift; the kids semi-abandoned by their parents; the mom who shows up every year and half with a new address and unresolved lost items; the enormous bureaucracy of the Library itself. But his keen observation and description are right on target and I would require this book of anyone considering working in a public Library or pursuing the Master's degree without prior library work experience.
Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother is excellent, thought-provoking reading on the state of motherhood amongst a certain class of educated liberally-inclined women (such as myself). She takes very strong aim at the judgment endemic to this population, in which every choice is defended to the hilt and foisted upon every stranger in much the same obnoxious vein as any random religious evangelizer. Her account of the perfect stranger accosting her to say "Breast is best" while she was feeding her baby with a bottle in public is shocking when you read about the heroic efforts she went through to nurse this child. The bottle in question contained her own pumped milk. Waldman is an excellent writer with few inhibitions and offers one of the very few accounts of a decision to terminate a much-wanted pregnancy due to genetic testing. She's also hugely funny and unsentimental.
Okay, it's late. I'll add to this in another post.
The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik--After an adolescence of avid reading of Science Fiction (not Fantasy) I found I didn't care for most Cyberpunk and only a few hard SF writers have caught my interest: Elizabeth Moon and Lois McMaster Bujold. (And no, I don't read their fantasy, either. Just don't give a damn about quests and magic and destiny, sorry.) And Connie Willis, who is in a class by herself both because of her general excellence and wide-ranging subject matter. Then along came Naomi Novik's thrilling debut His Majesty's Dragon which combined my love of the Napoleonic era with Dragons in an alternate history in a setting akin to the Horatio Hornblower novels. Awesome! It may not be LITERATURE or HIGH ART, but the book was well-written and exciting and funny. I understood the setting and loved that it was done at least as well as your typical Regency romance writer gets it. She's got a theme running through the books on personal dignity and slavery that reminds you that below the swashbuckling and lovely dresses, a lot depended on servitude of many kinds to make the world work. (And I would like to assert that these books are NOT fantasy--nothing magical happens, the dragons just are and brief explanations are provided about their biology to explain flight, fire breathing, etc. Their bond with their human handlers is imprinting, just like a duckling, nothing mystical about it at all.) Novik took time off to produce a baby, but has sent book 7 to her editor, so eventually there will be another installment.
Bill Bryson has written a lot of entertaining books, but his latest At Home has to be my favorite of the half-dozen or so that I've read. It's a scattershot history of domestic life, organized thematically by each room in his new home in England. So in the kitchen you learn about the history of stoves and meal preparation, in the parlor about upholstery, etc. I would love to see this book come out in an illustrated edition just as his Short History of Nearly Everything did. Over and over again as I read I wanted pictures!
Free for All by Don Borchert is a nitty-gritty account of life in a public library. Some of it is depressing--the homeless who hang out, adrift; the kids semi-abandoned by their parents; the mom who shows up every year and half with a new address and unresolved lost items; the enormous bureaucracy of the Library itself. But his keen observation and description are right on target and I would require this book of anyone considering working in a public Library or pursuing the Master's degree without prior library work experience.
Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother is excellent, thought-provoking reading on the state of motherhood amongst a certain class of educated liberally-inclined women (such as myself). She takes very strong aim at the judgment endemic to this population, in which every choice is defended to the hilt and foisted upon every stranger in much the same obnoxious vein as any random religious evangelizer. Her account of the perfect stranger accosting her to say "Breast is best" while she was feeding her baby with a bottle in public is shocking when you read about the heroic efforts she went through to nurse this child. The bottle in question contained her own pumped milk. Waldman is an excellent writer with few inhibitions and offers one of the very few accounts of a decision to terminate a much-wanted pregnancy due to genetic testing. She's also hugely funny and unsentimental.
Okay, it's late. I'll add to this in another post.