Elkit in Wonderland

Science Fiction ... Double Feature

NPR has a reader-voted list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels. Like so many other people, I love checking these out and checking them off. Let's see the tally of the ones I've read:

1. The Lord Of The Rings
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
3. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series (I read the first and part of the second, but not the whole series yet. Am mightily looking forward to the second season of Game of Thrones on HBO)
4. 1984
5. Fahrenheit 451 (I've probably read everything by Ray Bradbury)
6. The Foundation Trilogy (I've probably also read everything by Isaac Asimov)
7. Brave New World
8. American Gods (I *think* I've read this.)
9. The Princess Bride
10. Animal Farm
11. Neuromancer (and Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero, and almost all his other novels)
12. I, Robot
13. Stranger In A Strange Land
14. Slaughterhouse-Five
15. Frankenstein
16. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
17. The Handmaid's Tale
18. 2001: A Space Odyssey
19. The Stand
20. Snow Crash
21. The Martian Chronicles
22. Watership Down
23. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
24. The Time Machine
25. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (probably also read everything by Jules Verne when I was a teenager)
26. Flowers For Algernon
27. The War Of The Worlds
28. The Mists Of Avalon
29. The Left Hand Of Darkness
30. I Am Legend
31. The Time Traveler's Wife
32. Journey To The Center Of The Earth
33. The Dispossessed
34. Something Wicked This Way Comes
35. Wicked
36. The Eyre Affair
37. The Illustrated Man
38. Doomsday Book

Seen the movie, haven't read the book:

1. A Clockwork Orange
2. Starship Troopers (for the record, I think it's a really good movie)
3. Contact
4. The Road (I keep trying and failing to read Cormac McCarthy. It's not that I don't like him, but there's so. Much. STUFF. in there that I can't slow down enough in order to really get it. It's just too dense.)

Of all of the listed books, my personal favorites are (in no particular order):

• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• The Left Hand Of Darkness
• The Dispossessed
• Fahrenheit 451
• Doomsday Book
• Flowers for Algernon
• Wicked

And other personal sci-fi and fantasy novel favorites that I would add to my list:

• Kindred, Fledgling, and Bloodchild, all by Octavia Butler
• Passage, my favorite Connie Willis
• Engine Summer, by John Crowley
• Little, Big - also by John Crowley. I just got the audiobook read by the author.
• The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner
• The Stone That Never Came Down, by John Brunner
• The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson
• Moderan (Festung Zehn, in German), by David R. Bunch
• Das Jesus-Video, by Andreas Eschbach ... and ooooh! German Kindle books!!!
• His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass trilogy), by Phillip Pullman

If a zombie romantic comedy and vampire noir count in this category, then I would also add:

• S.G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament
• Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series

Are We, We Are, Are We, We Are The Waiting (40/52)

So Juliet, Naked was a winner. And then the next book I read, Await Your Reply, was I think the best novel I read all year. Didn't hurt that I read it on a weekend retreat in Santa Cruz, leisurely, in the sunshine, in view of the Pacific Ocean.

The story starts off with a bang - a man rushes his son to a hospital, in the middle of the night, somewhere in the Midwest (Michigan? I think). The son's severed hand is in a cooler in the backseat. 

Then, before you find out what exactly is going on here (how did the hand get severed, fer Chrissakes?), the next chapter follows a young girl in Ohio, who is leaving her small town with her lover, the man who was her history teacher in the past year. 

In chapter three, we are driving north through Canada with Miles, who is trying to find his long-lost twin brother. 

And then we're thrown back into the life of the son from chapter one, but there's no mention of severed hands, so we must assume this is earlier in the timeline.

I really liked how I got set down in the middle of the story, catching glimpses here and there, without fully knowing what was going on. Slowly, the three strands of narrative come together, but it took me all the way to the end of the book to really get it - which was perfect. GREAT payoff. I think I must read it a second time, now that I've seen the tale unfold all the way to the end. 

Let's Just Get Naked (39/52)

I ordered three novels from amazon.com recently, and the two I've read so far are total winners. Nick Hornby's latest, Juliet, Naked, the one I picked up first, was right up my alley. It's about a nerd who runs a web site devoted to a musician who used to be famous in the Eighties, but hasn't published anything in twenty years. It's about the nerd's girlfriend and their breakup. And it's about the musician and his life. And then these stories connect.

I liked this a lot. I figured I would, because I've liked all of Hornby's previous novels, but it was still a pleasant surprise to dive in and be completely engrossed. 

The novel's info page on amazon.com links to an interview with Nick Hornby. He has loads of interesting things to say about the topics he writes about - well, interesting to me, anyway. 

Meanwhile, I am casting the movie in my head. Oh, and speaking of movies, when I saw An Education recently, I did not realize that Hornby had written the screenplay. 

My Ride's Here (38/52)

I don't think I've told you yet that I went to Kepler's a few weeks ago, where Laura Rennert appeared at story time, reading from her new book, Buying, Training, and Caring for Your Dinosaur. The audience was mostly kids and their parents, but I'll bet you I had as good a time as all the smaller people did.

If you or your kids are in the market for a dinosaur, get this book! It'll help you pick out which kind of dinosaur matches your personality and your lifestyle, and it'll help you train your new pet. 

I really want a velociraptor, but I know that wouldn't work so well with my cats. Maybe we'll get a stegosaurus instead. 

Hey Now, Put Your Lights On (37/52)

Lifting two figs from the tree next door, I am reminded of fhe First Fig and the Second Fig:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends,
   It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
   It gives a lovely light!

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

(I've been reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's Selected Poems in bed at night. They are good night poems.)

Ell Oh Ell Oh Lola

I attended two Yale literature lectures today. They're from the course "The American Novel since 1945", and I watched two of them on the internet, thanks to Academic Earth. 

I think I'll try to finish this course, and definitely check out the lectures about Cormac McCarthy (whom I still haven't read). Of all the novels the course covers, I have only read one. Hrmpf.

Don't Rain On My Parade (36/52)

I managed to pick up a good novel and actually finish it within a few days last week. Way behind on my 52-in-52 quota though. Not sure what to make of this one. I really liked Revolutionary Road, however bleak it was. This other novel by Richard Yates, The Easter Parade, was not as depressing and despairing as Revolutionary Road, which is nice, but I couldn't connect with the characters as well. Yates opens the story by proclaiming that the two sister protagonists are predestined to have unhappy lives because their parents divorced when they were little, and that one of the sisters "never understood anything". I dunno, I didn't really get that from the story. I didn't think their lives were so terribly unhappy. Just ordinary. And I didn't really understand why Emily supposedly didn't understand anything. Maybe I am just as thick. I did still kinda like the book; Yates is a very good writer. But this one didn't draw me in like Revolutionary Road did. (I'm actually kind of glad. Now that the days are getting shorter, I don't really need extra downers. You know?)

Hey Now. Put Your Lights On (35/52)

Hey, I read another book this weekend! Playing with my new love has really cut into my reading time - I usually read at night in bed, but I've been making out with my iPhone since I bought it a month ago. But yesterday afternoon, I picked up Light Raid, and read it all in one day. Wheeeee! It's easy reading - I've read another novel co-written by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, and it was similar to this: a science fiction screwball comedy. This one had an added dimension of opposing political forces within a family, and I kept waiting and wondering as I read: can there really be a villain in the protagonist's family? And if so, is it the father or the mother? What's really going on? Is there another plot twist coming? 

Great summer/weekend read. 

Building A Mystery

John Crowley: I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to—what the story’s up to—and I’m giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover. It’s very important to me that readers win the game: i.e., come to understand what’s at stake, perhaps all in a moment (James Joyce’s “epiphany,” which happens both to the character and the reader) and perhaps in a gradual accumulation. I can’t guarantee readers will win in that sense, or that all of them will; and I of course want to leave some mysterious and unresolved remainder.

via www.avclub.com

The A.V. Club, which always has great interviews, notes that a 25th-anniversary edition of Crowley's Little, Big, with an essay by Bloom and art by Peter Milton, is coming out this fall. Sounds like that would be a great time to read again the story of Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice Drinkwater and their families. But now back to the interview ... if you'll excuse me ...

This Near Wild Heaven (29, 30, 31, 32, 34/52)

Right, the backlog.

I've read five more books since I last reported, and I have three more in the works. They kind of all fit the "wild" theme, check it out:

• Unearthed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the garage recently, and couldn't resist picking it up again. It had been so long, I forgot most of the characters. It was almost as funny as I remembered it.
• Fledgling by Octavia Butler was a great read. I just love her writing. I never heard about her until she died, when my sci-fi reading friends lamented her passing, and I was all, "Who?" Picked up a collection of short stories, and was hooked. This one is a vampire story. But not exactly. Butler is a bit hard to categorize, because it's always more than just the genre. She always makes me think, but never so hard that I'm not entertained. But don't take my word for it. Check her out for yourself. I read this one on the plane to Chicago, and in my hotel room at night, in between pillowfights and partying.
• I picked up a little something to read for the way home at the airport. I was in a non-fiction mood, and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto looked good.
• Staying on my non-fiction/food roll, next up was Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, which I'd started before the trip to BlogHer. I'd put it aside because it was hard to deal with the facts. Man oh man, we do terrible things to animals! And while we're at that, we do terrible things to the environment too. Oh, and the meat and eggs we get aren't so great, so we do terrible things to our health too.
• So my brain was full of non-fiction, and I switched to something short, sweet, and lovely: Where the Wild Things Are. Really looking forward to the movie.