Kristin Janz

Tag: books

  • The Empty Family, by Colm Toibin

    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.

  • Coffee Table Cookbook

    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.

  • 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.

  • Everything you ever wanted to know about elves

    I can’t decide if this is real; i.e., is this guy serious? I didn’t think so, but then I clicked on the link to go to his website, and apparently he’s a medium associated with this other medium who claims to be receiving messages from the spirit of Michael Jackson.

    As something of an authority on elves myself, I was pleased to see Mr. Valentine confirm their vegetarian dietary practices; though as anyone who’s seen the elf documentary The Lord of the Rings can attest, they are not only 3 feet tall. (The late elf archaeologist, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien (Oxford) discusses these misconceptions at some length in his articles.)

    The videoclip in the link is on the long side, but you only have to watch for a couple of minutes to get the joke. If it is a joke….

  • 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.

  • Readercon 2010

    My boyfriend Donald and I attended Readercon at the Burlington Marriott Hotel this weekend (Burlington Massachusetts, not Burlington Vermont). Readercon is one of my favorite science fiction conventions, and I’ve gone every year since 2005, except for 2008 when I was at Clarion West. It has no art show, no masquerade (and very few people dressing up in funny costumes), no movie/TV/gaming-related content (not that there’s anything wrong with that!); and the only things they sell in the dealers’ room are books and magazines. (Well, Darrell Schweitzer does sell his ancient Roman coins, but that’s it!) Since my interest in sf cons is primarily books and writing, this suits me just fine. It’s a fairly small con, and most of the people who attend (though not all) are either writers, editors or publishers. So it’s very good for networking (which, as far as I’m concerned, is a fancy word for hanging out with old friends and meeting new ones–or at least it should be).

    I had a wonderful time, as always, and got to catch up with a ton of people I don’t see very often, and I won’t try to name-check them all because I know I’ll forget important people (I mean that they’re important to me, not that I’m hoping they’ll buy my epic fantasy novel someday). However, I do want to mention that I got to see my friends from the New York City writers group Altered Fluid; a bunch of other friends from the Brotherhood Without Banners (the famous George R. R. Martin fan club); and several people from the Canadian science fiction scene, most of whom I was meeting for the first time. Also my Clarion West classmates Rajan Khanna and Theresa DeLucci (Raj is also a member of Altered Fluid), and our Week One instructor from Clarion West, author Paul Park.

    For some reason, I attended more panels this year than at a typical Readercon. I’m not sure if this is because of a change in me, or a change in Readercon programming. There were definitely more program items that I thought would be interesting than there are in a typical year. One person commented to me that they thought the programming was less intellectual than usual. (I’m pretty sure they meant it as a compliment.) Unfortunately, I was often (though not always) disappointed in my expectation that the program items I attended would be interesting. I won’t say which ones were a let-down, but one thing I’ve learned over the years, attending cons, is that how interesting a panel will be depends more on who’s speaking than on the topic.

    I also attended a “secret” room party (though not a very well-kept secret, it turned out), avoided drinking too much alcohol, and failed to avoid purchasing far too many books in the dealers’ room. And after I had been thinking of trying to use the library more often, and perhaps buy a Kindle to slow down my accumulation of heavy unread reading material. I got, among other titles, Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest novel (which I’ve been told is more classic Kay in the model of Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan, and not like his more recent The Last Light of the Sun). And The Desert Spear, the second novel in Peter Brett’s series (I got the first novel for free at a different convention, a couple years ago, and was surprised by how good it was.).

    I also picked up an anthology of short fiction entitled Tails of Wonder and Imagination. Yes, you guessed it, an entire book of fantasy & science fiction stories about cats. I have to admit, I initially picked it up off the table to make fun of it. I also half-considered buying it for my sister Lisa, since she loves cats so much! But then I noticed that there were actually a lot of really good authors in the anthology: George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke … so, yes. I bought an entire book of short fiction about cats. At a science fiction convention.

    I also have to thank my good friend Rene Walling from Canadian publisher Nanopress, for kindly offering to sell copies of the print chapbook of my story “Looking-Glass Milk” at his party on Saturday night, even though he had nothing to do with publishing it. He managed to sell nine copies, and is planning to take the other three I’d given him back to Canada to see if he can sell them at Canadian science fiction conventions (since I’m a Canadian writer and all!). So if you’re reading this from north of the border, and attend cons in Canada, look out for Rene from Nanopress, and see if he has any of my books left! (And check out the books he publishes: the press is very new, but they already have a short story collection by Canadian author Elisabeth Vonarburg, and an anthology featuring selected stories from the Aurora Awards, one of Canada’s major science fiction prizes.)

    I would be remiss in failing to mention that at least two of the chapbook sales were directly due to my wonderful boyfriend Donald convincing people to buy copies. Thank you, Donald, and I promise not to follow through with my threat to write Domini slash, after all.

    Looking back, I am sort of afraid that, when I was asked to autograph the chapbooks, I may have spelled someone’s name wrong. If so, I’m terribly sorry!

    All in all, it was a great weekend, and if you’re a fantasy or science fiction writer or fan, and the Boston area isn’t too far away for you, I definitely encourage you to check out Readercon for yourself next year.