Shelf-Sitter Challenge: Book 9

The ninth book I've read for my shelf-sitter reading challenge is Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson. It was a Christmas present-- one of the last books to make it on the shelf-sitter list. I'd never heard of Ronson, and frankly, it was one of the books I was sort of dreading having to read. Then I stumbled across a TED talk by Ronson, and realized that he wrote The Psychopath Test (which I heard about on This American Life), and that he's a pretty interesting guy. The book jumped to the top of my TBR list, and I felt like a brat for feeling put-upon by getting a cool book for Christmas.

Lost at Sea is a collection of articles (mostly written for The Guardian) that are all loosely connected by the theme of self-deception. Ronson interviews people who believe in weird stuff (Indigo Children, Alien Abductions), people who try to sell their beliefs to others (evangelical Christians, self-help gurus, psychics), people who have managed to rationalize the way they hurt others (pedophiles, credit card companies), and people whose self-deception has led to tragedy.

I thought half the articles were brilliantly done-- by turns amusing and chilling, depending on the subject. The other half weren't bad, certainly. Just less successful. Some felt too short and/or too glib. A few weren't effective examples of self-deception, and seemed out of place in the book. And a couple felt like the kind of article you write when your interview shits the bed and you wind up with nothing substantial to say, so you just write the hell out of it and hope no one notices the big pile of nothing in the center. Even in my own exceedingly piddly journalistic career, I've been there. It happens. But why put it in a book?

Also, there were too many copy editing errors. My own definition of Too Many is more than two in a book. I probably noticed five or six in Lost at Sea. This is obviously not Ronson's fault, since he is not a copy editor, but I did notice it and it did annoy me.

These quibbles aside, I recommend this if you're in the market for interesting, short non-fiction pieces about total wackos. And I'm adding The Psychopath Test to my TBR list.

And There Was Much Rejoicing

Ten chapters completed!

(I need to celebrate small victories right now.)

Checking In

The train is going, but it's been jerking down the track at the rate of two or three sentences a day. The Husband started back at work Monday after nearly a month on disability, and I guess I expected my attention span and ability to convey thoughts with written language to instantly snap back to normal, pre-crisis settings. That expectation probably made this week more frustrating and dismaying than it had to be. But seriously, guys-- tick tock! The two-year anniversary of TOB fast approacheth, and I'm not even halfway through the second draft!

Thankfully, today it started to come back, and I wrote three pages (so, maybe 900 words?). I was able to work for a while in the library of the boarding school where I tutor, which has the added bonus of no internet connection. I think that for now, I need the library to work. Tomorrow is my first day of The Son in school until 3:00 coupled with no appointments for The Husband in I don't even know how long, and I am going to get the hell out of this house and work at the library for at least two hours. I may even get myself a study room.

Shelf-Sitter Challenge: Book 8

The eighth book I've read for my 2013 Shelf-Sitter Reading Challenge is Ilium, by Dan Simmons. I read Simmons' Hyperion Quartet in 2011, and I count it among my favorite SF series EVAH. When I saw a new SF duology by Simmons in the used book store, I squealed a little. But then I doubted. Like the Hyperion novels, these books were long. And the blurb made it sound pretty wacky: Greek gods on Mars? Resurrected warriors reenacting the Iliad? I dunno about this. Could I really love another Simmons series as much as I loved Hyperion?

Silly rabbit. Of course I could.

The thing about Simmons is that I have no idea whether to recommend him or not. You and I could have significant overlap in our reading tastes, and you could still hate Simmons. I can definitely see that he's not everyone's cup of tea. These are long and sometimes ponderous epics, and he shoves everything in there he can make fit: multiple story lines, wild-ass science, philosophical musings, space travel, disgustingly graphic violence, friendship, romance, monsters, robots, the end of the world, and weighty literary analysis.

Given all that, his books are difficult to describe, which is what makes them sound kind of dumb on the blurb. But I'll give it a try. Ilium is a braid of three story lines: in the first, a twentieth-century classics professor has been somehow reanimated by supremely powerful beings in the form of the Greek gods, and is tasked with observing their reenactment of the Trojan war and reporting any deviations from Homer's account; in the second, four utopia-dwelling humans go on a quest and discover some of what humanity has lost; in the third, two autonomous, sentient robot friends from the Jovian moons deal with the aftermath of a mission gone wrong.

All the Simmons novels I've read have a deep interest in Great Literature underlaying them. (Hyperion was modeled after Canterbury Tales.) In this book, the Iliad is obviously a key work, constantly referenced as the events are retold (and invented, as the war eventually takes a different course than Homer's version). But there is also discussion of Shakespeare's sonnets, The Tempest, and Proust's Remembrance.

Actually, I think the easiest way to sum up why I loved this book so hard is a description from the Dramatis Personae page of the character of Orphu:

8-ton, 6-meter-long, crab-shaped, heavily armored hard-vac moravec who works in the sulfur-torus of Io; Proust enthusiast.

Shoveling the Coal...

...to get the train moving again.

In the past two weeks, I've opened TOB every day, and probably only added words to the file four of those days. I am terribly, horribly, hopelessly behind.

I really do think my brain was just fried from stress. Usually when I blow off working on the novel for more than a day, it's because the story's gone cold. But that's not the case now: I'm thoroughly immersed in Willa and Akenam right now, daydreaming about their story, listening to their soundtrack, trying out dialogue in my mind. It seems like all I can write for the moment is images and dialogue; I can't seem to string sentences of introspection and description together make paragraphs. Last night I stopped beating my head against the wall with the (already outlined and everything!) apology scene and started writing the dialogue and images for a scene in the second half of Act II, because it was playing in my head like a DVD, and before I knew it I had 500 words of fairly detailed scene outline and a complete set of dialogue.

This morning, I got an unexpected chunk of quiet time when a student didn't show up for our session, so I tried tackling the apology scene again. I started with the last 3/4 of the scene, which is mainly dialogue that I've already written-- all I had to do was connect the lines of dialogue with a few sentences of action and introspection here and there. I'm about 3/4 done with it. Then I'll go back and write the first 1/4 of the scene, in which Willa is sitting around brooding about how spectacularly she's managed to fuck up on her first day of being envoy.

April:3, Lianna:0

You win again, April.

I did manage to do a full scene workup yesterday. But my brain is like a caffeinated hamster scrabbling around inside my skull right now. I can't seem to get out of crisis-mode. I had scads of time to write today, but I spent all of it trying to chill the fuck out.

Related aside, to be filed under "weird things about me": you know what I enjoy waaaaaay more than I should? Reading ranty book reviews. In my chill-the-fuck-out attempts, I've been watching a lot of movies of the PG-13 summer blockbuster oeuvre, but it turns out I should have been reading mercilessly sardonic reviews of poorly written books instead.

I don't know what it is about them-- you'd think that, as an aspiring novelist, I'd be horrified to see an author's work savaged until it limps away clutching its genitals, but it cracks my shit up. And the effect is cumulative: the more ranty reviews I read, the funnier they become, until I am cackling like a crazy person with tears rolling down my cheeks. I know I'm setting myself up for all kinds of horrible future review karma by enjoying them so much, but right now I don't care, because after working my way through all the 1, 2, and 3 reviews at Books I Done Read, I feel like I spent the afternoon getting a pedicure and sipping on a drink with a little pink umbrella.

Shelf-Sitter Challenge: Book 7

The seventh book I've read for my shelf-sitter reading challenge is Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey by Charles Pellegrino. The Parent gave me this book years ago; she's spent her retirement thus far taking classes at Harvard on the Roman and Egyptian empires, so it's fair to classify her as a bit of an ancient history buff. I'm more of a fair-weather history friend: I love it as long as it doesn't make me work too hard. This book was on the verge of making me work too hard.

Pellegrino uses the lenses of history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, and even theology, to examine the volcanic eruption in 1600 BCE of the Greek island now known as Thera (which means "fear"). Thera was the center of the mysterious and impressive Minoan civilization (dude, they had flush toilets!), and is almost certainly the basis for the story of Atlantis. Along the way, he discusses everything from deep sea exploration to the extinction of the dinosaurs to the biblical story of Moses.

I would describe this as popular science crossed with LitFic. Pellegrino takes an experimental, non-linear approach to his subject, jumping around in time and between academic disciplines to tell the story of Thera. It was an interesting book, but I couldn't read more than 30 or so pages at a time without needing a break from it. And by the end, I felt like he was repeating himself; the book was 300 pages and easily could have been shorter by a third without losing any content. I'm glad I read it, though: it was well-written and I learned a lot.

Recommended for those with an interest in archaeology and ancient history, who don't mind their popular science writing on the challenging side of "popular".