Kristin Janz

I recently participated in a panel at the World Fantasy Convention on the importance of getting real-world details correct when writing fantasy fiction.  One suggestion that came up for authors writing in a historically-based setting was to read fiction written by authors living in that time period, because they often make throwaway comments that can give us terrific insights into how their contemporaries lived and thought.  I mentioned that I had been reading Don Quixote, and at one point there are these women who’ve supposedly been cursed to grow beards (actually, they’re men pretending to be women as a joke on Don Quixote, but that’s beside the point).  Don Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza says, “I’ll wager they don’t have enough money to pay for somebody to shave them.”  And I realized, which I never had before, that if your fantasy world doesn’t have safety razors and good mirrors, you can’t have all the men walking around clean-shaven unless there are a lot of inexpensive barbers.

Don Quixote is full of surprises.  Another thing I never realized was that the Monty Python cheese shop sketch is pretty much cribbed from Cervantes.  Here’s the Don Quixote version, from Edith Grossman’s recent (2003) English translation (no, I’m not nearly so literate as to be able to read Don Quixote in the original 17th century Spanish):

Sancho asked the landlord what he had for supper.  The landlord responded that he could have anything and could ask for whatever he wanted:  the inn was stocked with the birds of the air, the fowl of the earth, and the fish of the sea.

“There’s no need for so much,” responded Sancho.  “If you roast a couple of chickens for us, we’ll have enough, because my master is delicate and doesn’t eat a lot, and I’m not much of a glutton.”

The landlord responded that he did not have any chickens because the hawks had devoured them all.

“Well, Senor Landlord,” said Sancho, “have them roast a pullet, if it’s tender.”

“A pullet?  Good Lord!” responded the landlord.  “The truth of the matter is that yesterday I sent fifty to be sold in the city; but except for pullets, your grace can order whatever you want.”

“Then that means,” said Sancho, “that you have plenty of veal or goat.”

“For the moment, there’s none in the house,” responded the landlord, “because it’s all gone, but next week there’ll be plenty.”

“That does us a lot of good!” responded Sancho.  “I’ll wager that everything you don’t have can be made up for by all the eggs and bacon you do have.”

“By God,” responded the landlord, “that’s a nice sense of humor my guest has.  I already told you I don’t have pullets or chickens, and now you want me to have eggs?  Talk about some other delicacies, if you like, and stop asking for chickens.”

There’s also a scene where Don Quixote and an author discuss the pros and cons of self-publishing, an exchange eerily similar to those I hear among fellow writers today.  Plus ca change….

“Is this book being printed at your expense or have the rights already been sold to a bookseller?”

“I am printing it at my own expense,” responded the translator, “and expect to earn at least a thousand ducados with this first printing, which will consist of two thousand copies that can easily be sold for six reales each.”

“Your grace is certainly good at calculations!” responded Don Quixote.  “But it seems you do not know how printers collude or the favors they do for one another.”

“And?” said the translator.  “Would your grace prefer that I give it to a bookseller, who’ll pay me three maravedis for the rights and think he’s doing me a favor?  I don’t print my books to achieve fame in the world, because I’m already well-known for my work; I want profit:  without it, fame isn’t worth a thing.”

The famous tilting at windmills scene happens very early in the novel; so early that I have to wonder if it’s so famous because a lot of people through the centuries didn’t bother to read much farther.  They should have, of course.  Cervantes published Don Quixote in two volumes, ten years apart.  If you only read the first bit of Part One, you’ll miss all the scenes in Part Two where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are trying to explain away the inconsistencies and plot holes in the first volume.  And running into people who know who they are from having read Part One.  And dissing the unauthorized sequel that some other author wrote to cash in on the success of Cervantes’ work.  (There really was an unauthorized sequel.)  Not only that, the entire novel, in true epic fantasy style, purports to be not the original work of Cervantes, but merely his translation of some lost manuscripts written in Arabic by a Moorish chronicler named Mr. Eggplant.

The only reason to not read Don Quixote is that it’s over 900 pages long.  But if you like epic fantasy, that shouldn’t stop you.  Imagine, it’s like reading one of the Wheel of Time books … and only having to read one.  With much less description of the embroidery on women’s dresses (though not, by any means, none at all).

You can find more interesting facts about Don Quixote here.  Then go read the novel!

My story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate” is now out in Imaginarium 2012, an annual reprint anthology from ChiZine Publications and Tightrope Books featuring the previous year’s best Canadian speculative fiction (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, and whatever else the editors decide fits).  The story came out last year in Aoife’s Kiss, a small print magazine, so it’s exciting for me that my story was chosen to appear in Imaginarium, and perhaps reach a wider audience.

Imaginarium is already available in Canada, either directly from the publisher, or from Amazon.ca or Chapters/Indigo, and you can get it in either trade paperback or e-book (all the major formats).  I don’t know if it’s also available in brick-and-mortar bookstores.  (You know, the old-fashioned kind, that you have to walk into.)

The publisher does make more money if you buy it from them instead of a third party, and that means they can then put more money back into the business, publishing more books and paying more authors.  But of course, they (and I!) would be delighted if you choose to buy a copy, no matter where you buy it.  There are 37 stories and poems, most of them by Canadian authors far more famous than I.

If you live in the United States, you can get it now from any of the aforementioned e-book retailers (or direct from ChiZine), but the trade paperback won’t be available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or other online bookstores until at least the end of August (although you can pre-order).  I’ll post here again once it is available.  You could still order it from the publisher, but the shipping is another 165% on top of the cost of the book.  (Please blame Canada Post for the outrageous price, not the publisher.)

If you don’t live in either Canada or the United States … well, I hope you like e-books!  Although it’s interesting how our expectations have changed.  20 years ago, if a book I wanted came out from a small publisher in another country (especially if that country was not the United States), I would have taken for granted that it would be difficult and possibly expensive to obtain.  Nowadays, I feel kind of miffed if I can’t get cheap 7-day shipping.  But you may be a better person than I am.  (I’m pretty sure ChiZine will ship the book to you anywhere in the world with a functional postal service, but they will have to charge you whatever it costs them.)

ChiZine Publications does appear at various science fiction conventions throughout Canada and around the world, often with a table of books for sale, if you’re a convention-goer you might also be able to purchase the book there.  (They’ll be at Worldcon in Chicago, and World Fantasy in Toronto, among others.)

I recently finished reading the first novel by new author Courtney Schafer:  The Whitefire Crossing.  It was one of the free books I got at last year’s World Fantasy convention in San Diego.  I definitely recommend it, if you enjoy epic fantasy.  The plot is tight and suspenseful, the main characters are interesting, and the secondary world in which the story takes place is one you want to learn more about.  The premise is that a young smuggler named Dev takes on a dangerous job, trying to smuggle a runaway apprentice mage into a neighboring country, while being pursued by the apprentice’s furious master.  It ends on a not-quite-cliffhanger, where there’s a pause in the action but it’s also clear that Dev’s story isn’t finished.  But the back cover of the book does warn that it’s “Book I of The Shattered Sigil“, so that’s okay.  I definitely want to read Book II, to find out what happens next.

While I did think the book was excellent, it did have a couple of flaws.  We’re told over and over (and over, and over) about Dev’s motivation for accepting such a dangerous assignment:  he needs the money to keep the daughter of his deceased mentor out of slavery.  But I thought this could have been shown more effectively, perhaps by drawing more parallels between the young girl in danger and Dev’s former lover, who was sold into slavery at a similar age (not in a creepy way; just in the sense of him not wanting the same thing to happen to his mentor’s daughter).  Also, the villains are cartoonishly evil, and I tend to prefer stories that explore the complexity of what makes someone evil (or good, or in-between).  But the characterization of the two protagonists (Dev, and the young apprentice Kiran) was complex and interesting enough that I could overlook those flaws, and the author used the alternating viewpoints very effectively to tell the two halves of the story.  As an author myself, I was definitely paying attention what Shafer was doing there; also to how skillfully she handed the unfolding of the plot and the building of dramatic tension.

The cover, by David Palumbo, is also excellent, and is one of the reasons I chose to read this book over the half dozen other new 2011 novels I got for free at World Fantasy.  Not just because it was pretty, but also because it signalled pretty clearly what sort of book this was, and all other things being equal I’ll usually choose the epic fantasy novel first.  But the fact that the cover was attractive and professional-looking certainly didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that the book was published by Night Shade Books, one of the best-reputed medium-sized publishers of fantasy.  (These are all things that I think about as I write my own novel, and listen to the debates about self-publishing vs. traditional publishing.)  Though on the other hand, a few years ago I read a free-from-World-Fantasy novel published by Penguin, with a cover by a much more famous artist, and that book was awful.  (I’m not going to say which book it was, since my motivation in discussing books on my blog is to recommend books that I think people should read, not slag other hardworking authors.)

It’s good to see epic fantasy being written by other women, too.  I don’t particularly seek out the work of other women writers; I read whatever interests me, no matter who wrote it.  But most of the big name authors in the field tend to be men, so it’s encouraging to see other women writing great fantasy novels and getting them published by major houses.

If you’re a writer, Courtney Shafer’s website also has some excellent, candid information about the process of finding an agent and getting published, so be sure to check that out!

Last weekend, Donald and I were in Nova Scotia for my 20-year highschool reunion. It was a lot of fun! I attended a tiny highschool in rural Nova Scotia, and our graduating class was somewhere between 40 and 45 students. So there wasn’t anyone in my class that I didn’t know; although, embarrassingly, I had trouble recognizing some people at the reunion. Not as many people made it for the 20-year reunion as for the 10, but it was still great to see everyone who showed up.

Never mind that, though! I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about the cookbooks I acquired on my trip.

My parents are thinking of moving again (for the 3rd time since I graduated from highschool), so when I was there, my mom had been going through all the stuff she’s accumulated over the years and deciding what she really wanted and what she was going to try to sell in a yard sale.  She had a big box of cookbooks she’d decided she didn’t want anymore, and invited me to go through and see if there was anything I wanted. (Of course, she’s still keeping most of her large cookbook collection; I come by my love of cooking and cookbooks honestly.)

To my horror, she was planning to get rid of this gem from 1970, James Beard’s How to Eat Better for Less Money (a revised edition of an original 1954 publication).  (The dust jacket was long gone by the time I was old enough to start reading cookbooks, so I’ve only ever seen this cover.)  I can’t tell you how many hours I spent poring over this masterpiece as a child.  It had a chapter on cheese, with descriptions of all sorts of cheeses too fancy for us to buy in Nova Scotia in the 1980s (and too expensive for our limited food budget–I think the emphasis is on the “eat better”, not on the “less money”).  There are suggested menus for various occasions (“Summer Terrace Dinner for 6″,  “Winter Brunch for 4″).  There’s even “A helpful supplement on budget wines and spirits” at the end.  I used to fantasize about cooking all the different menus for dinner parties I would have someday (yes, I was an odd child).  I’m not sure how many of the recipes from this book I actually made as a teenager, but there was the notorious granita di caffe that I made for dessert when I was about 14, and that turned my brother, sister and me off coffee for years (I like coffee now, but I still can’t drink iced coffee or eat coffee ice-cream, in memory of that dessert; though I think that the problem was not so much that it was a bad recipe, but that children aged 9-14 who aren’t used to caffeine and suddenly eat a whole bunch of coffee slush drowned in whipped cream are likely to make themselves sick to the stomach, and that’s what happened to us.).

Ah, memories.

The sad thing, though, is that the Suck Fairy appears to have waved her magic wand over this cookbook, because, looking through it, I can’t imagine I’m ever going to make any of these recipes.  They’re not all bad, exactly (though there’s a disturbing section on ways to cook hot dogs); I just think that the recipes that sound decent are pretty close to similar recipes in better cookbooks (like the America’s Test Kitchen ones).  And the wine and spirits section!  Oh dear!  I’m sure the wine section is reasonable, though it’s no longer quite as useful for me to know which vintages of the 1960s will be a good investment for future drinking (unless I want to raid my friend Bob’s cellar).  But how about this tip:

“To serve a superb premium Scotch at low cost, buy six bottles of a low-priced blended Scotch and one bottle of Smith’s Glenlivet or Glenfiddich unblended all-malt Scotch.  Pour the contents of the seven bottles into a container and mix them.  Refill the seven bottles and put on your own label, which might read, ‘John Smith’s Personal Selection.’  We promise you the result will be as good as any $9 Scotch on the market.”

Well, that may be true.  But somehow I don’t think they’re talking about a $9 Scotch in 2011 prices.

A lot of the advice in the book is outdated.  It suggests using “hot-roll” mix to make quick pizza.  Apparently this book was published before you could buy those cardboard tubes of pizza dough at every grocery store.  It warns that shallots are hard to come by, and that you might be able to find them “in foreign markets in most large cities” (try Stop and Shop).  It suggests buying your meat from a knowledgeable neighborhood butcher instead of the grocery store (these days, it seems that you have to live in a large city for there to even be a neighborhood butcher, the decent ones all seem to be pretty high-end and not a place to go to save money, and at a lot of the chains pretending to be neighborhood butchers–like the Meat House in Arlington–you end up having long, frustrating conversations explaining to them where on the animal the cut of meat you want comes from if it’s anything more obscure than a brisket (can they not use Google?)).

It’s sad when a beloved cookbook is cursed by the Suck Fairy (the magical entity who points out to you that the books you loved as a child really aren’t that good).  I’m almost afraid to look too hard for a copy of another out-of-print childhood favorite, The Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking (to be distinguished from the far more famous and not out-of-print Larousse Gastronomique).  This wasn’t one my mother owned, but one I used to borrow from the bookmobile over and over (a bookmobile is what you have, at least what you used to have, when you attend a tiny rural elementary school without much of a library).  I think the bookmobile must have gone to more than just elementary schools, otherwise it had a weirdly high number of cookbooks.  But I digress.

My mother was also getting rid of Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes From the Celebrated Greens Restaurant.  It looks pretty good, though it’s also a little out of date (1993).  The author keeps telling you that you probably won’t be able to find Meyer lemons if you don’t live in northern California (and then tempting you with recipes that require them–so cruel!).  But they’re pretty common in Boston, when they’re in season.  I mean, they’re common if you shop at Whole Foods or Russo’s or Wilson Farm (i.e., with all the other yuppies).  Maybe not at the Stop & Shop.

I also acquired Great Good Food: Luscious Lower-Fat Cooking, by Julee Rosso (one of the co-authors of The Silver Palate Cookbook).  This one I’m a little more iffy about.  It looks like it has good recipes, but they’re organized by seasonal menu or event rather than ingredient or type, and the seasonal menus are a bit idiosyncratic.  For instance, I just opened the book at random to the Spring chapter and found a menu for “Dinner After Ballooning”.  Apparently the author likes to go up in a hot air balloon in the spring when it’s nice, which is kind of cool, though of course not as cool as if it were a zeppelin and she wore steampunk garb (did I mean cool or dorky?).  Anyway, Herbed Bruschetta, Monkfish Medallions, Baby Zucchini with Pesto, Red-Hot Radishes, and Strawberry Sorbet sound lovely.  But it’s kind of a pain to think, “okay, I need a recipe for monkfish”, and not to be able to turn to a nice, convenient chapter entitled “Fish.”  This might be why this cookbook is apparently out of print, and Fields of Greens is not.

I poked through my mom’s box of craft books that she no longer wanted, too, and didn’t find as many prizes, since I like cooking best.  I did find Parties and Projects for the Holidays (Christmas With Martha Stewart Living), which is mostly crafts, but has some recipes too, for holiday menus.  They’re my favorite sorts of menus to make, the ones where the suggested timeline starts off with “One week before” (i.e., you can’t possibly make all those things in one solid day of cooking alone).  They’re not the favorite menus of friends and family who have to put up with me while I’m cooking, though, since I tend to get just a little bit stressed out (i.e., impossible to put up with) when I’m cooking a long, complex menu.  Of course, Martha Stewart’s book is not just about cooking.  There are also step-by-step instructions for making Christmas ornaments from tinsel made out of real gold and silver.

Finally, although this is a cookbook only in the sense of having recipes, not in the sense of telling you how to make food, I acquired The Complete Soapmaker.  I’m probably not really going to start making my own soap, but it’s one of those things I like to pretend to myself that I’ll have time to do someday (like gardening, knitting, sewing my own clothes, making cheese, brewing beer and wine….).  The book gets very mixed reviews on Amazon; some people say it makes great soap, others say it makes terrible, useless soap.  But the recipes sound cool.  The book does make the mistake of telling you to add water to the lye when you’re mixing it, not the other way around (which is much, much safer).  This error has apparently been corrected in later editions, but since I worked as a chemist for 13 years, I sort of already knew this.  It also seems like a lot of the reviewers on Amazon are inordinately afraid of lye.  I mean, it’s corrosive and can be dangerous, don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that when you’ve worked in the lab with materials that can burst into spontaneous flame upon exposure to moist air (and seen them do it, and had to put out the fire with an extinguisher), lye doesn’t seem so scary anymore.

My sister was quite concerned that I might have gotten our mother’s copy of Your Country Kitchen, but Mom isn’t getting rid of that one yet.  And besides, I already have my own copy of this out-of-print treasure that I picked up at a used bookstore a few years ago.  Despite the fact that this is a British cookbook, many of the recipes are quite good (especially if you have a kitchen scale, since a lot of the quantities are given in weights), and the cheese fondue recipe is my “go-to” version.  So Lisa can have this one, if Mom ever decides she doesn’t want it anymore.

I still want the Purity cookbook, though!

I just finished reading The Empty Family, the new short story collection by Irish literary author Colm Toibin (apologies for the lack of accents; I’m not a sophisticated enough blogger to know if WordPress has a way of including accents in foreign words).  I try to not read just high fantasy, even though that’s what I like best, because I think that reading more broadly makes me a better writer (at least, I hope that it will).  Of course, this means that I don’t actually get around to reading most of the big high fantasy titles that come out each year.  But I think the trade-off is worth it.  I think when I just read the same sorts of stories all the time, I develop a terribly narrow view of what constitutes good fiction, and I like trying to learn what appeals to other readers in a book that I might not be quite as excited about as, say, the latest installment in A Song of Ice and Fire.

What I found most compelling about the stories in Toibin’s collection was his wonderful skill of characterization.  The individuals who populate these stories are all complex and vividly portrayed, sometimes less aware than the reader of what’s going on around them, sometimes self-deceptive, but always fascinating.  My favorite story was “The New Spain”, about a young woman returning home a few years after Franco’s death, after living in London for several years.  The family summer home on Menorca has changed in the years she’s been away, leading to conflicts with her parents and sister; but perhaps she also bears some of the blame for the changes that she loathes.  It’s a beautiful, slow-moving examination of coming home after enough years have passed to change both the traveler and the homeland.

I also really liked “The Colour of Shadows”, about a man caring for the dying aunt who raised him after he was abandoned by his mother, and “The Street”, about two Pakistani immigrant men in Barcelona and the relationship that develops between them.  I have a sense that the stories I liked best were the ones that, to me, seemed to have the most momentum, or plot, where I was intrigued because it felt that things were happening and I wanted to know what would happen next.  I think this is a genre reader/writer thing, and it seems to me that in literary fiction, it’s perfectly acceptable to write a story that is a close examination of a key moment in a character’s life, but in which (to a prejudiced genre reader) not a lot seems to happen.

It’s good to see what authors will do when they’re not working under the constraints that I’m used to.  I found the characterizations in Toibin’s collection much deeper and richer and also more subtle than I usually find in fantasy or science fiction short stories.  But I still liked best the stories where he brought this skill of characterization to a situation with more obvious conflict and momentum.

I recently bought this cookbook. It’s a gorgeous hardcover with a colorful cover, and many beautiful pictures of delicious-looking food inside. It was an impulse purchase. I’d been shopping for a dress for my wedding (yes, yes, the store at which I purchased the cookbook also sold dresses!), and the book was just so lovely, and the recipes sounded so good (at least to read about) that I just couldn’t resist.

The gimmick for this one is that it’s divided into 4 chapters, one for each season, and the recipes in each chapter feature foods that are at their peak in that season (at least, in the northeastern US; the author is based in New York City). Within each chapter, there’s a 2-page spread highlighting what’s best this time of year, then a section for seasonal cocktails, one for appetizers, one for main courses, one for desserts, and one for breakfast foods (also a couple of sample menus at the end of each chapter).

First off, I love that it includes seasonal cocktails, and most of them sound very tasty. Though the only one I’ve made so far, the rhubarb mule (a Moscow mule with the addition of sweetened rhubarb puree), was WAY sweeter than it needed to be. I made it a second time with extra lime juice, and it was still too sweet. There’s a preponderance of vodka cocktails, as well, which suggests that the recipes are tailored to the palates of those who like the idea of fancy drinks, but don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. But I should try more of his recipes before I judge. Also, the author seems to feel the need to give a shout-out to every brand of premium vodka currently on the market. There are three vodka cocktails in the Spring chapter, and each one suggests a different brand of top-shelf vodka. I mean, really? Do you even need top-shelf vodka when you’re drowning out whatever flavor there is with fruit juice and sugar? Maybe I’m just not a vodka connoisseur, but I made the rhubarb mule with Level vodka one time, and Skyy another, and really couldn’t tell the difference.

The only other recipes I’ve tried so far are “Mammy Louisette’s Ginger-Rhubarb Tart” and “Vermont Double Cream Ice Cream” (vanilla ice-cream with extra egg yolks and creme fraiche). The ice-cream is quite delicious. It seems pretty hard, but this is the first time I’ve made ice-cream at the new apartment, so I don’t know whether that’s the recipe or our freezer. I wasn’t quite as happy with the tart, but I think that might have been my fault. It had a puff pastry crust, and the center never baked through, even though the edges would have scorched had I left it in for longer. I think I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, though, scooping the sweetened and flavored rhubarb into the crust, and I added too much liquid. I also think the crust wasn’t cold enough when it went into the oven. That might be partly the fault of the recipe, though. It says to put the puff pastry in the tart pan, then chill for 30 minutes, then add the fruit, fold over the edges, and bake. My timing was a little off, because Donald needed the oven for French fries at the 30 minute mark. However, there’s no way, after 30 minutes in the freezer, that those rock solid pastry edges are going to fold over. Even after putting it in the fridge for a bit, they were still quite hard. I had to bring it out to room temperature for a while to soften them up enough. However, it might have been a good idea to stick it back in the freezer for a few minutes after I’d added the rhubarb and folded the edges over, because that might have kept the juices from soaking through the center of the tart as much.

I do want to make other recipes in this book. However, it does seem to me that most of them are fancy dinner party food, and not really all that useful for helping me figure out what to do with all my CSA vegetables. Many of the recipes would just take far too long (and this is saying a lot, if you know how much time I typically spend cooking already). I mean, I just don’t have time to make “Aromatic Stuffed Suckling Pig” on a Wednesday night after work.

Which brings me to another issue with this book. I’m an adventurous cook and grocery shopper, and I live in a major urban center in the United States. And a good number of these recipes call for ingredients that I don’t know how to get. Fresh porcini mushrooms? I’ve never seen fresh porcini mushrooms at a store in Boston. Ditto veal sweetbreads. Not to mention suckling pig. Maybe I could order suckling pig from a butcher. But, seasonal or no, these are just not common ingredients. Huckleberries? I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh huckleberries for sale even at Russo’s. I think you have to live in New York City to make a lot of these recipes.

I probably sound pretty negative about this cookbook, but I should also confess that I spend a lot of time reading it, and trying to convince myself that the recipes wouldn’t be that much work to prepare. They just sound that delicious! Maybe for a dinner party sometime….

The best part, though, is Rachael Ray’s blurb on the back cover, which refers to the recipes as “simple preparations and easy ideas.” Which might tell you all you need to know about Rachael Ray’s so-called 30 Minute Meals.

While thumbing through the Lonely Planet guide to Italy on my new Kindle, Donald found a reference to this book.

From the Publishers Weekly review:

‘Colorful frescoes, metal objects or ceramics are shown in 114 illustrations (95 in color), divided among nine chapters explaining ancient societal attitudes toward sex (“Woman on Top: Women’s Liberation in the First Century A.D”; “Laughing at Taboo Sex in the Suburban Baths”), while subheadings like “Priapus, Protection, and Penetration” offer scholarly and personal anecdotes.’

Since we both write about fantasy worlds inspired by ancient Rome, it would probably be a very useful reference for both of us.

We’ve not yet added it to our wedding registry, though.

(Oh, yeah, in case you didn’t notice on Facebook, Donald and I are engaged now. Yay! It’s very exciting, though a little overwhelming.)

I’m currently reading The Arabian Nights, a fairly recent translation (1990) by Husain Haddawy. Over the last few years, I’ve tried to start reading some of the classics of Western literature. Assisting me in this attempt is the embarrassingly useful reference guide, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (There are also 1001 movies to watch, 1001 albums to listen to, etc.) Laugh all you want, but I’m the sort of person who enjoys lists, and enjoys trying to do everything on a given list (Donald can attest to this, after I dragged him around to see every single sculpture at the De Cordova open-air museum.) And it’s not like I’ve stopped reading books that didn’t make it into the 1001 Books list.* It’s just that I’ve found this reference book a good place to get ideas for books I might want to read that didn’t get reviewed in Locus.

I have to say, of the really really old books in the 1001 Books list, I’m enjoying Arabian Nights far more than I enjoyed Aesop’s Fables, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chariton’s Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Heliodorus’ Aithiopika, and Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. A lot of it probably has to do with the accessibility of the translations; I can’t speak to how closely Haddawy’s translation matches the original Arabic texts, but I find the writing fresh, lively and interesting in English. I think my enjoyment of Arabian Nights may also be partly because the stories are not as ancient as the others I’ve mentioned, and are thus culturally more accessible to a modern reader. (Familiarity of the stories may be part of it, as well, though some of the more famous Arabian Nights tales are not included in the translation I’m reading because their authenticity is apparently either dubious or absent – Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, for instance. And Aesop and Ovid both had a lot of familiar stories.)

So, I’m enjoying Arabian Nights. One thing I never realized before, though, is how erotic some of the stories are. I was telling Donald about The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies. There’s this porter, waiting in the marketplace to be hired, and a woman comes by and hires him to carry her groceries home from the market. When they get back to her house, the porter finds that, not only is she quite beautiful, but she lives with two other women who are even more lovely, and no men. He invites himself to stay for dinner, and they accept his invitation, and they all start drinking … well, you should read it yourself, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot of splashing naked in the fountain and “carousing”.

Anyway, Donald said, “That sounds like a Penthouse letter or something. ‘I never thought something like this would happen to a porter like me….’” Not that Donald has ever read Penthouse, of course; at least, that’s what he tells me.

Interestingly, the version of this story that appears in the children’s abridged version of Arabian Nights says only that the porter “sang a song … The three ladies were pleased with the song, and then sang themselves, so that the repast was a merry one, and lasted much longer than usual.” Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

There is, of course, far more to Arabian Nights than erotic stories of lovely women entertaining lonely porters. It’s a wonderful source of ideas to steal–er, be inspired by–if you’re a fantasy author. And there are really great insights into the culture of the 13th century Muslim world, and the every day life. For instance, in the story about the porter and the ladies, as they go through the market, you get to read about all the different shops they stop at, and what the lady buys at each one: at the fruit vendor’s, various fruits as well as baby cucumbers and flowers; mutton at the butcher, as well as charcoal (!); at the grocer’s, olives, cheese and pickles; at the dry grocer’s, dried fruits and nuts and sugar cane and roasted chick peas; cakes and cookies and sweet breads (not the pancreas kind!) at the confectioner’s; perfumes at the druggist, as well as loaves of sugar, candles and torches. (This being the Muslim world, the lady buys wine not at a wine shop, but by stopping at the apparently unmarked door of a house, “and when she knocked, an old Christian came down, received a dinar from her and handed her an olive green jug of wine.” Obviously not a southern Baptist Christian!) I mean, this kind of information about how people would do their shopping and what they might buy is just invaluable, if you’re writing fantasy set in a medieval sort of world.

Another fascinating insight comes where, in one of the stories, a lady relates how she used to be so wealthy that she owned 10 complete changes of clothing! I mean, I guess it would still be unusual today for a man to own 10 expensive suits, unless he were quite wealthy and needed to wear suits every day to his job. But reading stories from a time so long ago can really help you to step out of assumptions you might have about what people’s lives would be like in an imagined world that you’re writing about. If having 10 outfits is a sign that you’re very wealthy, you probably don’t want the baker’s daughter in your story owning 3 or 4 outfits. (I mean, obviously it depends on which historical time period and cultures you’re borrowing from, but it’s just good to think about these things.)

The next really old book on my list is Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. An English translation, obviously. I once tried to read Victor Hugo in the original French, and gave up after a page and a half; if I can’t handle 19th century French, I’m unlikely to do better with the 16th century. We’ll see how that goes. It’s over a thousand pages long, so I’m a little worried. (I feel I should clarify that this is not the next book I’m planning to read, just the next really old book I’m planning to read.) But I hear that it has plenty of sex, too.

* No, no, there are plenty of other lists for me to choose from! I’m also trying to read all the Hugo-award winning novels. Then I guess I’ll read the Nebula-winning novels that didn’t also win Hugos, then maybe the World Fantasy winners … don’t know what I’ll do after that.

I do also read novels just because I picked them up and thought they looked cool, or because I’ve liked other books by that author, or because a friend recommended them. They don’t have to make it onto a list first. Just so you know.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through the latest installment (Book 12) of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This is the first book of the series to have been finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. Sanderson has said that he will be able to finish the series in two more books.

I approached these co-written books with some trepidation. But I do really want to know what happens. And it’s not like the last half of the series had actually been that good, after all. (A friend of mine said that The Wheel of Time is like drugs. You keep trying the books, hoping they’ll be as good as they were the first time you got high. But they never are. I personally think books 4 and 5 are brilliant, but after that, the pace starts to drag a bit. Then it starts to drag a lot.)

So, is the new book good? Well, yes. The pace is a lot quicker, for one thing. The plot hasn’t moved like this in over a decade. As far as I can tell, every scene in the novel has a purpose in advancing the plot. And there’s way less detail about Aes Sedai fashion. No more Project Runway Tar Valon! And somehow–I don’t know whether it’s Sanderson’s skill as a writer, or Jordan having finally nailed the characterization before he passed away–Rand doesn’t seem as whiny anymore. The Rand scenes finally seem to have struck the right balance between terrible responsibility and abject guilt, and it’s a huge improvement.

I don’t think the Mat scenes are quite right. Mat just doesn’t seem as much fun as he did in earlier books. But I didn’t notice anything else that felt off. Egwene’s scenes are perfect! (I think Egwene is my favorite character, after perhaps Moiraine.)

Definitely looking forward to the last two books!

(and your evil sidekick Brandon Sanderson)

No time for blogging today; I spent too much time reading the latest installment in The Wheel of Time.