Read This: In Other Worlds & 11/22/63

Yesterday, I had a review in Shelf Awareness for Readers, talking about In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a collection of essays where Margaret Atwood elaborates on her relationship to science fiction—what she thinks it is, and why she wasn’t writing it all those times you thought she was writing it, although she has tried writing it and she likes some of the things other people have done with the genre.

I found a lot of things to like in In Other Worlds, but I wasn’t completely satisfied, and in a paragraph that was excised from the final, shorter version of the review, I explained why:

“The problem is that this is all rather a hodgepodge: While the opening section does offer a cohesive theory on the literary roots of modern science fiction—including some interesting glimpses at Atwood’s early academic specialization in a tradition she identifies as the “English metaphysical romance”—the middle section basically extracts SF-themed material from the more expansive essay collection Writing With Intent and adds a few reviews that she wrote after that book was published. Readers will learn that science fiction contains ‘all those stories that don’t fit comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlour of historical fiction,” but they’ll only gain scattered impressions of what those stories might be like, not a comprehensive critical history such as you might
find in the late Thomas M. Disch’s (highly opinionated) The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of.”

It’s basically a question of how tightly Atwood ties all her disparate thoughts on science fiction together: None of her thoughts are uninteresting—in fact, they all struck me as sound, although the opening essays are a bit conventional—they just didn’t seem to gel for me. But she’ll give you plenty to think about, so I encourage you to check the book out if you get a chance, anyway.

I had another review in the daily Shelf, taking on Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a nearly 900-page fantasy about a high school English teacher who’s shown a hole in the space-time continuum that leads back to 1958 and is recruited to spend five years in the past, verify that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t part of a conspiracy, and then stop him from assassinating John F. Kennedy. As a story, though, that’s practically an abstraction, even to the protagonist, so King gives Jake Epping more substantial personal motivations to go back in time and then stay there—first to right a tragedy that befell one of his adult GED students as a child, then to preserve his relationship with a librarian in a small town outside Dallas. As I wrote, 11/22/63 “reveals the capacity of ordinary people for extraordinary moments of love and courage,” but keep in mind: When Stephen King puts his characters to the test, he tests them hard.

(And, yes, King fans: Not only does the second act take place in Maine in 1958, it takes place in exactly the town you’d want it to, under those circumstances.)

26 October 2011 | read this |

What I Was Reading All Last Month

You haven’t heard from me much these last few weeks, and for that I apologize. The good news is most of my radio silence was due to working hard, including two speaking gigs in Oxfordshire and Saskatchewan, but mostly the usual assortment of book reviews and other freelance writing. In my capacity as the literary correspondent for USA’s Character Approved blog, I’ve written about Feynman, a biographical “graphic novel” about the Nobel-winning physicist who was one of my inspirational role models after I discovered his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, as a high school student. I also encouraged folks to check out memoirs by Binyavanga Wainanga (One Day I Will Write About This Place) and Lucette Lagnado (The Arrogant Years, a fantastic biography of David Matthews of his childhood friend (Kicking Ass and Saving Souls), and powerful novels by Amy Waldman (The Submission) and Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones).

I’m really enjoying this gig, because it’s exactly what I want to do—taking a book that deserves a large audience and putting it in front of more people, with the hope that I can encourage even a few people to give it a try. That’s also the impetus behind the “Whatcha Reading?” series I do at inReads.com, except that there I film other authors and their recommendations. Early in September, after writing about her memoir, Yoga Bitch, at the USA blog, I met Suzanne Morrison and got her talking about Colette…

And, because I knew from her own book that she enjoys reading spiritual conversion memoirs, I gave her the copy of Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford, a story about a Canadian woman who went to Oxford in pursuit of an advanced degree and wound up discovering and embracing Christianity. The conversations felt a bit too well-laid-out in some patches, but overall I thought the way she frames her story gives a compelling dramatic thrust to the struggle to deal with her personal spiritual upheavals in the context of a largely secular and vigorously postmodern academic environment. (And a reminder that sometimes we find allies in the places and at the times we least expect them!)

Oh, and over at Reader’s Entertainment, I had some questions for Lee Goldberg about signing with Amazon.com’s mystery publishing imprint, Thomas & Mercer, to publish the Dead Man series, a series of monthly horror/adventure novels starring a character Goldberg co-created with William Rabkin. They’re essentially “show runners,” making sure the novelists hired to write each installment stay close to the central concepts while otherwise letting their imaginations loose. I’m really curious to see how this project turns out—the rise of electronic publishing has shown us that there’s a fairly healthy market for genre stories that the print publishing sector didn’t necessarily view as sustainable, and as a fan of “men’s adventure” characters like Remo Williams, the Destroyer, or Casca the Eternal Mercenary, I’d love to see some new franchises emerge and flourish.

4 October 2011 | read this |