Kristin Janz

Category: books

  • The Joy of … Research

    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.)

  • Dear Penthouse

    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.

  • The Wheel of Time turns … and turns … and turns

    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!

  • Curse you, Robert Jordan!

    (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.

  • Spanked by Heinlein

    I recently finished reading Robert Heinlein’s 1956 novel Double Star. Unlike many of my writer and fan compatriots, I didn’t grow up reading Heinlein. I’m not sure I’d ever even heard of him until college. My child and young adult reading skewed more to fantasy than science fiction. I’ve read Stranger in a Strange Land within the last 10 years, but Double Star is only my second Heinlein novel.

    The story takes place in 2100, but since it was written in the 1950s, people still use slide rules and make audio recordings exclusively on tape. And use encyclopedias for research (paper encyclopedias, presumably; at one point the protagonist mentions referring to the ship’s copy of a major encyclopedia).

    Another thing I noticed: I’ve only read two Heinlein novels, but in both novels, some no-nonsense older man threatens to spank a young, attractive woman for impertinence. To be fair, in Stranger in a Strange Land (published in 1961), the young woman threatened with the spanking, at another point in the novel, helps two other women to dump the man in question into a swimming pool for being insufficiently polite. Still! Do men threaten to spank women in all Heinlein novels?

    The novel was fast-paced and entertaining, although the way it caricatured anyone who disagreed with the “correct” politics of the future (as far as I could tell, basically libertarianism and free trade) was mildly irritating. I find it more interesting when an author acknowledges that many of the people who disagree with his or her politics do not, in fact, eat babies. (Okay, there was no actual baby eating in Double Star.) It reminded me a little of C.S. Lewis, in that respect. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m a huge fan of C.S. Lewis, but there’s just not a whole lot of moral complexity in the Planetary Trilogy; I think there’s probably more of it in the Chronicles of Narnia, interestingly enough; can children perhaps handle moral complexity more easily than grown-ups?)

    Now I’m reading Book Twelve in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (this is the first book co-written by Brandon Sanderson, after Jordan’s death). A series in which, as Donald pointed out, there are many spankings and threats of spankings.

    As far as I can remember, there are no spankings in Donald’s novel.

  • Top Five(-plus) Novels

    A few months back, on the mailing list for my Clarion West class, someone started a thread asking people for their Top Five novels. I hesitated to contribute until it became clear that a lot of other people in the class couldn’t limit themselves to just five, either.

    The question of Top Five is difficult, too. Top Five that I like best now? Top Five most influential on my own work (even if I’ve come to realize that they aren’t all that good)? Top Five that I should claim to like, so everyone will think I’m, like, really smart and all?

    I went with something between 1 and 2. But, yeah, there’s way more than five.

    Little House on the Prairie series, Laura Ingalls Wilder: My mother taught me to read before I started kindergarten, using a “teach your toddler to read by bribing them with treats” method that probably flies in the face of modern educational techniques. But it worked. In first grade, when most of my classmates were learning to read, me and this other girl who could already read had our own separate special reading class, and the teacher would take us to the school library and pick out books for us (or maybe she gave lists of suggested books to our parents; my memory is a little fuzzy on that point). I remember reading all the E.B. White children’s classics, and I liked them, but not nearly so much as I liked the Little House on the Prairie books. I desperately wanted to live in pioneer days. I used to think this was because the life depicted in the books was so different from mine. Now I’ve begun to suspect that, since my parents were doing this hippie back-to-the-land/raise-your-own-pigs/grow-your-own-vegetables thing, I liked the books because there were aspects that reminded me of my own life. Only with long dresses, and horses.

    The Bible: For my 6th birthday, I asked for a Bible. What I really wanted, but never told my parents (probably because I assumed they already knew), was a fashion accessory Bible. There was another little girl around my age at church who always brought this pretty New Testament with a white leather cover and gold-edged pages. THAT was the Bible I wanted. Instead (since I could read), my parents gave me the Children’s Living Bible: the complete text, only in simple language that a child could understand. Mind you, the content wasn’t edited. Every gang rape, stoning, animal sacrifice and tent-peg assassination is still in there, only at a 4th grade reading level. No one bothered to tell me that the Bible was different from a novel, so I read it like it was a novel. I loved it! Well, except for the boring parts. But I skipped those. This was probably the origin of my love for epic fantasy. Move over, floor-length calico dresses! Bring on the swords and epic battles!

    The Tower of Geburah, John White: I can’t re-read this, because I suspect that the Suck Fairy will have waved her magic wand over it. (According to a Boskone panel, the Suck Fairy is the magical entity who reveals to you that your favorite books suck. There’s also a Racism Fairy and a Sexism Fairy.) The book is a blatant Narnia rip-off (magical television sets instead of a wardrobe) for the children of evangelical Christian parents who thought the Christian message in the Chronicles of Narnia was too subtle. But I hadn’t read the Narnia books when I was 8, so I thought this was amazing. It’s got swords, and castles, and a nine-foot tall evil sorceror, and a barely averted human sacrifice scene that gave me nightmares for weeks.

    The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis: I read these so many times. Despite the elves in my own epic fantasy world, it’s WAY more Narnia pastiche than Tolkien pastiche.

    The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander: I’ve stolen ideas from this series too.

    The Dark is Rising (series), Susan Cooper: Oh, the badly-written prophetic poetry I tried to work into my own novel after reading these! I also tried to work in a subplot about King Arthur (though The Fionavar Tapestry (Guy Gavriel Kay) also deserves some blame for inducing me to think that this was ever a good idea). Fortunately, the bad poetry and Arthurian subplot went by the wayside while I was still in highschool.

    Anne of Green Gables series (first 3 books), Lucy Maud Montgomery: There are 7 books. I think the series kind of jumps the shark after the first 3. Especially book 7, which ends up being WWI pro-Allied propaganda more than a compelling story (though anyone who thinks propaganda necessarily makes bad art hasn’t seen Casablanca). But the earlier books are awesome. I was reading one of them in elementary school during our end-of-the-day free reading period, and I didn’t even hear the bell ring. It was a very loud bell.

    Emily of New Moon series, Lucy Maud Montgomery: Emily is the emo-Anne. Dark-haired, brooding, consistently unpopular with her classmates, wants to be a writer … she even has pointed ears, and people comment on how she looks kind of like an elf. I have to point out that, while not necessarily pre-Tolkien (I think these came out around the same time as The Hobbit), this series is DEFINITELY pre-LOTR. So there. Tolkien did not invent elves.
    These are dangerous books to give to preteen girls unless you want them to become writers.

    Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare: Can we include plays? I include this one because I’m kind of obsessed with Romans (I put them in my epic fantasy series), and I think it started here. Though I’m not sure whether it was the text of the play that did it, or the movie portrayal of Mark Antony by a young and hawt Marlon Brando.

    The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien: Okay, I admit it, I didn’t put elves in my epic fantasy series until I read this. It seemed like a good idea at the time….
    I read these one summer, and was so hooked I stayed up each night reading until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

    The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, Mary Stewart: I stole a lot of stuff from these, too. This was the first novelized re-telling of the Arthurian legends that I ever read, so it always felt like canon to me.

    The Thornbirds, Colleen McCullough

    Memory, Sorrow & Thorn (trilogy), Tad Williams: One of the best surprise twist endings in all of epic fantasy. It undermines the conventions of the genre in the same way that The Murder of Roger Akroyd did for mystery.

    The Wheel of Time (12 books and counting), Robert Jordan: Books 4 and 5 are among the best epic fantasy ever written. If he’d finished the series in 2 more volumes after number 5, this would be an amazing work of fantasy fiction. Instead, the plot basically stalls for five books. Five 900+ page books. And yet, on the strength of those earlier volumes, I still want to put it on my list.

    The First Man in Rome (and subsequent books), Colleen McCullough: Incredibly dense Roman historical fiction. Thank you Colleen McCullough, for doing so much research for YOUR novel that I can just read the appendices instead of doing my own research! (actually I’m exaggerating, I’ve done lots of my own research on ancient Rome, and have the 400-page history textbooks to prove it)

    A Song of Ice and Fire (4 books and waiting), George R.R. Martin: It’s unclear to me that Martin is ever going to actually finish book 5, let alone the entire series. I include it anyway because it’s SO well-written, and the structure of the first book is such a wonderful text for anyone else who wants to see how to sidestep many of the problems inherent in writing an epic fantasy series (how to avoid information overload on the part of the reader, especially too many names of characters and places, how to bury foreshadowing in plain view, how to avoid long and boring descriptions of scenery that have no relevance to the plot….).

    The Deptford Trilogy and The Cornish Trilogy, Roberston Davies: Smart, humorous, well-written books that nonetheless avoid playing literary tricks for their own sake, or trying to show off how clever the author thinks he is; everything is subservient to the demands of telling a good story. My favorite is book 3 of The Cornish Trilogy, The Lyre of Orpheus, which is kind of like a book version of Waiting for Guffman, only funnier.

    The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin

    To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis

    Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke: This seems to be a book that people either love or hate. I loved it. It’s like a really long Jane Austen novel. With fairies and magicians. And footnotes. Really long footnotes.

    Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

    The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon

    Flora Segunda, Ysabeau S. Wilce: After reading this the first time, I wanted to immediately go back and re-read it, to find all the clever bits I might have missed, and have a better appreciation of how they all fit together.

    Okay, so that was a few more than five.

  • Is there such a thing as Christian horror?

    I just finished reading the 2nd Edition of Coach’s Midnight Diner, an anthology of “hardboiled horror, crime, and paranormal fiction with a Christian slant”.

    I was mostly reading it because my boyfriend has a story in the anthology. But I’d heard of this anthology before. I remembered being impressed by their submission guidelines. Most Christian magazines and anthologies are way less forgiving of profanity, sex and violence in the stories they publish than, say, the authors of the Bible (to pick a completely random example). So I was heartened to read that it wasn’t really an issue for them; I think the guidelines said something along the lines of “God’s not a pussy, and neither are we.”

    They’ve, um, changed it since to something less crude. (“This is not Guidposts or your Sunday School quarterly.”) But I still approve. The first anthology they put out was subtitled “The Jesus vs. Cthulhu Edition”, further evidence that the editors have a sense of humor.

    The one I read was “The Back From the Dead Edition.” Some of my favorite stories: “Flowers for Shelly”, by Greg Mitchell, was possibly the most memorable story in the anthology, with the best description I’ve ever read of a first person narrator who turns into a mindless zombie during the zombie apocalypse. Jerry Gordon’s “9th Ward” was also memorably creepy, very short, but with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming. I’d be amiss not to mention Donald’s story (for which he used the byline D.S. Crankshaw), “The Office of Second Chances.” I don’t claim to be offering an objective opinion here, but it was one of my favorite stories in the anthology; it’s probably the most humorous story, with its send-ups of action/thriller cliches and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond time. I also liked Maggie Stiefvater’s “The Denial” (about a demon who falls in love with a human woman, and finds some kind of redemption), Daniel G. Keohane’s “Box” (about a victim of child trafficking) and “Small Accidents of God”, by Virginia Hernandez (a teenage girl is unnerved by the menacing shadows she can see hovering around other people, and hopes that “getting the Spirit” will make them go away).

    One thing that the anthology got me thinking about is whether there can even be such a thing as Christian horror. I’m not talking about the window dressing of horror, the zombies and demons and serial killers and such. What I mean is that many critics seem to be arguing that one of the essential features of horror fiction is, at its core, a sense that everything is meaningless. That there’s no underlying purpose to our lives, or to life in general; or if there is, then the mind behind that purpose (if there is such a mind) does not wish us well. Most Christians would agree, I think, that this worldview is antithetical to the essential doctrines of Christianity.

    I realize that Coach’s Midnight Diner doesn’t limit itself to horror fiction. But having read the anthology didn’t do much to convince me that there is such a thing as Christian horror. Most of the best stories were neither horror, nor particularly Christian (I don’t mean that they were anti-Christian, just that Christianity wasn’t relevant to the story). Some were one, but not the other. Even stories with horrific or frightening elements often ended on too much of a redemptive note to seem true to the grim and hopeless horror aesthetic.

    I think one of the reasons I especially liked “Flowers for Shelly”, though, is that it did a better job than any of the other stories at walking the line between Christian faith (the first person narrator who turns into a zombie is a devout Christian, and of course there’s the question of how God could allow a zombie apocalypse to happen to good people), and grim hopelessness (perhaps there’s a purpose, but the zombified protagonist isn’t going to find out what it is). It’s also a bleakly funny story.

    Of course, on the other hand, the Bible itself can be pretty horrific, and not just in window trappings (“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit,” as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us). I’d argue that if you read the entire book, the horrific bits are just local minima (to use a scientific analogy); overall, there’s a purpose. Not necessarily for individual lives, though. People die without ever seeing the redemption that they’d hoped for.

    So I guess I don’t have an answer to my own question. One thing I do know, though; every so often while I’m typing up a blog post, it auto-saves and tells me how many words I’ve written so far; and for an awfully long time while I was writing this post, the word count was 666.