Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

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I was all kinds of pumped to read this book. (Yes, I had to get over the big brother in me who saw all my little sisters reading this book at one time or another and automatically assumed it would be a girl book.) I've been told it makes grown men cry. So I borrowed a copy and gave it a go.

Little Women is a beautiful, lovely book. I can see how, if I weren't madly taken by a real flesh-and-blood woman, I could fall in love for Jo March. At the very least, I sympathize with her entirely--and when her little sister destroys her book, I get angrier than Jo, and I am less quick to forgive.

The problem is, this book is continuing my recent trend (see Innocents Abroad) of books not giving me the whole story. Of course, none of these books bother to announce that they are incomplete, or one part of a multi-volume set. Maybe everyone else in the world knows that Little Women is multiple books. I didn't. I got to the end and wondered how anyone could cry at that ending. Then I wondered if I was more callous than I had ever imagined.

Nope. I just got shafted. Again. So I don't feel particularly qualified to say more on the topic yet. One of these days, I will find the rest of Alcott's tale, and I'm looking forward to it.

The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

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Quick post on this one:

In the Venn diagram of "international travel," "American author," and "humor," not many titles fall in the cumulative overlap. Yet because I like to think I might have a claim to all three at times, I wanted to read a book during this build-up to moving to Ireland to which I could relate, or which I could at least appreciate.

So I picked up the old copy of The Innocents Abroad that's been sitting on some shelf or another for over five years now, ever since I bought it at a book market in London, and gave it a go.

Whatever a writer's own inclinations, reading Mark Twain is an educational experience. His prose is an exemplar of intellectual vernacular, of sentences as involved and complex as any Victorian yet which are as easily understood as the speech of a dear friend.

I feel confident having his voice echoing in my mind as I embark on this new adventure abroad. His skills and influence cannot but strengthen my own writing.

(Though reader be warned: apparently, some copies of The Innocents Abroad don't include the full text. They are filled with promises of reaching the Holy Land, only to cut you off somewhere in the Mediterranean without so much as an indication that you've been cruising through Volume 1 of some indeterminate number of volumes. Not that I'm bitter or anything. At least it's not Mark's fault.)

The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving

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As I dig into the craft of writing, certain questions of The Canon continue to puzzle me. The Canon for me was established in high school as this set of writers who had Made It, who had done more than merely create Literature but had indeed shaped it, altered its course, defined what we high school students were destined to read.

Then, for anyone who reads a book after high school, The Canon becomes a much fuzzier reality (though still very, very real). Some rebel against it--if it's Canonical, it ain't cool; many in this crowd will defend Watchmen to the end as if no one has accepted it as Literature. To so many people who think like this, anything with Literary Merit must be boring, self-indulgent, and never intended to sell more than ten copies. Some other people struggle to alter The Canon's definition; an entire branch of Academia is dedicated to finding J.R.R. Tolkien a place in The Canon. (I happen to agree with them.) And some expand The Canon to include anything Literary.

This is where John Irving's writing puzzles me deeply. His work is Literary--probably every single review or endorsement mentions somewhere its Dickensian qualities. Yet he sells incredibly well, has several books adapted to film, and has even won an Oscar. And the content. Literary my arse!

But why not? Why shouldn't a story that includes incestual lust, motorcycle-riding bears, an Austrian brothel-slash-hotel, and a baseball-bat-wielding blind man named Freud be acceptable Literature?

Apparently, it is. (Though try describing this book to anyone, anyone, and they'll think it's all kinds of messed up. Also, if you recommend it to your remarkably picky selective English friend, he will probably be speechless for the first time.) At least, it's not shunned the way genre fiction is.

(Note how genre doesn't get the Winnie-the-Pooh capital letter treatment. Think of your snottiest college professors, and now think about how they would say "genre fiction." It deserves a leering italic font!)

I don't mean to come across like a complete relativist here, but I just wonder why we value some works over others. The Hotel New Hampshire may not be Irving's best-known book, but some lucky kids get to read his writing in high school. Yet this book has moments that make Tom Robbins say "Daaaaaayum!" And I'm pretty sure, no matter how rock-star popular Robbins is, he will never be considered as Literary as Irving.

The Canon will never be fully decided or even understood. But contemplating it cannot but be a healthy activity for the book-minded folks of the world.

Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey

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When I wrote about Bitter Seeds before, I mentioned that it bumped the next book on my list from the top of the genre-novel-of-the-year list.

This is that book.

Already, Leviathan Wakes is garnering incredible feedback and sending massive ripples through the genre waters. (I have it on hearsay that a top bookbuyer at a major bookseller thinks it will resuscitate the science fiction genre.) And it's only the first in a (three-part?) series. It's a damn fine book, co-written by two damn fine writers who also happen to be two damn good and really damn smart guys.

The book receives enough praise elsewhere that I don't need to parrot it all here. But I don't see enough discussion about what this book does to genre expectations (and it may well be that I'm just looking in the wrong places). The words "space opera" get bandied about all the time with this book, which is valid, but it goes so far beyond that.

Leviathan Wakes has two main narratives: Holden, a Serenity-style space captain, and Miller, a noir detective.

Screech the brakes, right? The former half of that equation sounds like warmed-up leftovers, and the latter sounds entirely out of place. That's what I loved about this book, though. Holden might have the swagger of Mal Reynolds, and he might be the captain of a Firefly-esque crew, but the narrative takes him in entirely different directions, sometimes more subtly than others. Holden is optimistic where Mal is realistic. Holden believes in doing right--not relatively, not half-assed, but wholly, repercussions be damned. You start off believing him to be a cookie-cutter moralist space captain,* but he's got... shapes. His sides get cut out and taped back on in different ways, so that by the end of the story, he's got a different form than at the beginning.

*Wait. There's a cookie cutter for that?

And Miller? This book made me wonder why the noir detective ever went out of style. (I'm convinced he never did -- his form simply changed, first into James Bond, and then in a number of fragmented directions.) He's got all the vices and problems you expect, except... he feels soggier, somehow, than Spade or Marlowe. This is a man who's been through the sewers of existence, and didn't come out as clean and shiny as the characters in Buffy do when they emerge from the sewers.

I'm not a genre writer--at least, not in the strict sense that the James S.A. Corey amalgamation is--but this book has affected more than my writing. It's informing the stories I tell. That's why any authors who turns their noses at a particular form deserve to have bookshelves fall onto them. Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places. And how cool is that?

(Oh, and you want to talk endings that wrap everything up while still delivering a kicker that makes you salivate for the next volume? This book's got it good.)

Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis

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[If you're down for a toys-in-the-sandbox brawl between warlocks and superheroes, go let your mind wander for a bit while your grown-up eyes read the rest of this post.]

For the amount of books I read (all of which I used to post about on this blog, though lately that number has dropped to those that beg more thoughts or insight from me), I'm often surprised by how few of them grip me, grab me, snag me, and refuse to let go of me until I turn to the back cover and discover the promise of no more pages.

Bitter Seeds is that rare book, and it could hardly have been written by a friendlier guy.

Ian Tregillis was one of the science fiction and fantasy authors featured at this summer's Mythcon conference in Albuquerque. In coordinating these writers' track panels, I met and shot the shit with some of the authors (including Daniel Abraham--check out the interview below--and Ty Franck, who co-wrote a book I'll be posting about soon), all of whom are pretty cool guys. And as if anyone doubted the intelligence of solid fantasy authors, these panels proved just how sharp this collection of Southwest-based writers really is. (Shout out to Melinda Snodgrass, Carrie Vaughn, Robert Vardeman, and Jane Lindskold, too!)

Then there was Ian. If you saw him in a crowd and had to label him, you would say something like "physicist." Which he is. Abraham called him (and I'm paraphrasing here) a fucking genius, and he's hardly exaggerating. But on top of that, he was incredibly eloquent with his words, giving with his time, and open with his ever-increasing fan base.

And almost none of us had heard of him before Mythcon.

Okay, I'm done touting him as a person. You don't buy some stranger's book because he's a nice guy. But Bitter Seeds is excellent. It's the first volume in a trilogy (The Milkweed Triptych; the second book doesn't come out til summer 2012, and I'm already considering a pre-order), and what an opening salvo it is.

If I pitch the book as an alternate history of World War II, where the Nazis scientifically create superheroes and the British turn to warlocks, you may think it sounds hokey, a hapless mish-mash of fantasy and sci-fi. But it ain't. This book is excellently crafted, and it does what so much fantasy doesn't (and to its detriment): the powers of its characters are limited, and they come with severe cost.

This story isn't a young boy's sandbox dream clash between magicians and Superman. Each wizardly process demands British blood sacrifices. The superheroes last only as long as their batteries--and these orphans-cum-lab rats all have their own shortcomings. Doesn't that just ring true, despite the fantastical nature of it? So many great leaps we make as individuals and as a society come at some cost. Besides, what fun is a great achievement if it comes without any inherent risk? That, to me, is why Tregillis's book pulls off its alternate world so effectively.

Not to mention that the hardcover edition (can't speak yet for the paperback) is incredibly handsome. I hope the publishers make the whole trilogy match, because so few books these days look this good on a shelf. And so few books that look good on a shelf make for reading this fine.

If you buy one genre book this year, make it Bitter Seeds. And I say that with the painful realization that the next book on my list would deserve the mantle almost any other year, with almost any other competition.

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

How I have gotten this far on my nerd cred without having read this book is beyond me. Thank all things good that I was not mauled for ever saying "The only Moore book I've read is Watchmen. (And no, the movie of V doesn't count. Not even close. Not after reading this. Whoa.)

V for Vendetta is hardly the first story about a society where people don't stand up for their rights, those inalienable pieces of civilization that so often become classified as "privileges" and are pushed aside for "necessity's sake." The few seeking to control the many under the guise of order and safety, and sometimes even prosperity, happens all the time in the real world, that precise one in which we live. Moore just fabricates a new one, one that might have been conceivably possible at the time he wrote it.

Though the key has changed, the melody stays the same.

As is often the case, one voice raised does little good. A lot more than no voice at all, to be sure -- but one voice can be quelched. One voice can be silenced. One voice can be talked around and over until it sounds like mindless babble. Sometimes, when the drivel is loudest, it becomes reason.

By not raising our voices all at once, all together, to speak out and say "no," V argues, we relinquish control. We hand over freedoms and our liberties hilt-first.

In the story, the oppression comes in the forms of genocide, of pervasive surveillance, of an inability to speak up without being brutally muted. But really, how is that different than the America we live in right now? (Other than the pervasive surveillance. We might not be at Moore-level England, but we have already given up far too much right to privacy, and too much of it entirely willingly.) Our government (not to be confused with our executive branch, though that branch as a whole is playing far too nice and like enormous wusses) has been deciding and is continuing to decide that the privileges of the very few, very wealthy people and the biggest of corporations are to be preserved above and beyond the most basic rights of every working-class and middle-class woman, man, and hell, even child in the United States of America.

And what do we do? We bitch and moan, we gripe and complain. But those deciding that the richest cannot pay a little more in taxes, that we have to play chicken with our country's future in order that those least harmed by the latest recession continue to thrive, have not had the fear of the public put in them.

If all people in this country voted only by their financial interests in the next election, each and every one of those bastards would be run out of office by 90% of the vote. (And for once, I'm being conservative.)

If every person in this country would let it be known that they cared about what decisions are being made on the public's behalf and that every person were willing to do something about it, I guarantee the current financial "crisis" would be a non-event. It would be past. It would never have been existent.

This isn't about Republicans or Democrats. It's not about labels. V is labeled a "terrorist" by the English government because he fights against its interests. But what V has that modern-day terrorists don't is this: he is not fighting for an ideology, but for ideals. He is not blowing up buildings to make people afraid, but to open their eyes and bring them to action. He attacks symbols not for what they represent, but for how they have been corrupted from their origins.

Do we need to blow up buildings to be heard? Hell no. But our society is not as oppressed as V's England.

Not yet.

Al"brew"querque

Well, whaddya know. I've got a new blog project -- but don't worry, it won't spell the end of Alone at the Microphone. It's completely different in every meaningful way. (Except for, you know, being a blog.)

It's called Al"brew"querque, and it's a blog about beer. Jenny and I began co-writing pieces a while back about beer and the places one finds beer. We finally figured that other people might enjoy what we have to say. And so far, the response has been positive.

So mosey on over to Al"brew"querque and get your yeast on! (Wait, that sounds bad. Get your malt on? Get your hops on? Get your water on? Get 'em all on!)