Current Caprice: Cocoon GridIt Organizer

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I do, however, make New Year’s lists of things I’d like to have happen that only I am empowered to accomplish.  For 2011, one item on the list is to expand this underutilized blog by talking about (gasp!) things I like other than books.

For instance, my bags—pluralized because I tend to switch off fairly often, not out of any innate bag-houndishness (although I accumulate bags much more readily than, say, shoes), but because my daily bag needs vary greatly, usually based upon how extensive my paper-hauling needs are.  Sometime last year, the hassles of rotating all of my somehow terribly necessary junk from bag to bag led me to click “buy” on this Cocoon GridIt organizer ($19.28 as of this writing; also available on Levenger, although when I ordered from Amazon it was on discount and a couple of bucks cheaper).

After several months of use, I’m infatuated with this thing.  On an average day, my GridIt looks more or less like this:

(For those wondering at the contents, it’s holding: an iPod touch, hand lotion, a pill case, Blistex, iPod headphones, a couple of pens, a mini-notebook, some hair pins, an all-important bottle of Visine, and a USB thumb drive.)

This is a 12″ by 8″ medium size model.  GridIt also makes a smaller and larger size.  I’m not sure how useful the smaller one would be unless I had a lot of smaller pieces to carry, and the bigger model (which is 15″ by 9″) seemed unlikely to fit into my smaller bags.

The back side of the GridIt has a zip pocket big enough to hold a slim mass market paperback, a hipster PDA, or whatever else you can imagine of a similar size.

Its elasticized straps, which have tiny rubber grippers woven in, hold a variety of miscellany securely and, most importantly, off the bottom of my bags, which consume miscellany as their primary food source.  It’s a vast improvement on enclosed pouches, which require digging around whenever you want to retrieve anything.  I chose the less sexy gray color over the black option to make it easier to see dark items.

I’ve found only two minor dampeners to my enthusiasm.  The first is that the GridIt is fairly heavy for its size.  I have a suspicion this is because the internal base has to be sturdy enough to support whatever contents get strapped onto it and resist bending with the elastic on the gripper side.  And it’s not a ridiculous weight by any means—the product info says 0.7 lbs., which seems about right—it’s just that it’s enough to be noticeable in a bag that you’re hauling around all day.  The second is that I’ve noticed that over time the straps have lost a tiny bit of their elasticity, which is probably to be expected.  It doesn’t seem like any of the bands will get stretched out beyond use any time soon, but it’s enough to be noticeable.

Nathan Lowell – Quarter Share

Considerations both financial and temporal (i.e., my ridiculously long car commute, for which there is no viable public transit replacement) led me to turn to podiobooks as a supplement to my Audible habit.

Happily, my first listen was Quarter Share, which has a lot of fun launching the naval coming-of-age story into space.  The first in a series dubbed The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, Quarter Share covers the coming of age of one Ishmael Horatio Wang (yes, the first line is “Call me Ishamel.”), who winds up serving aboard the Solar Clipper Lois McKendrick after the death of his mother leaves him no choice but to abandon the corporate-run planet where she worked and they lived.

Lowell’s direct style and sense of the pacing necessary to pull off a serialized project convinced me of the merits of podiobooks when a couple of years of hearing about them hadn’t.  Hard SF may find themselves unhappy with the lack of hard SF (…as when are they not?), and I had my quibbles–for instance, that some of the protracted discussions about the fairly self-evident mechanics of trading left me wanting to scrub the audio forward and make up for it by playing a few hours of Tradewinds 2 when I got home–but they were minor.  There’s no big bad here (although I can think of an antagonistic force that might get developed later in the series), no space-operatic action scenes, and not much by the way of romance; rather, Lowell’s focus is on the day-to-day, and I found myself looking forward to adding the daily life of the Lois McKendrick to my own.

Quarter Share and the other books in the series are available to download at podiobooks on a voluntary gratuity basis, and Lowell has also begun releasing print versions.

Fresh as a Wilted Daisy & Diving Back in With Sociopaths

I have been away on mysterious business, which also caused my normally rapacious reading pace to crawl.  Happily, I think the worst is behind me.

One of my 2010 reading resolutions was more nonfiction, and I have been following up.  One of the “stickiest” (in the still-thinking-about-it-months-later way) nonfiction reads of the summer was Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door, which was recommended to me by two different people after a group of my friends had an unfortunate blow-out with a person who certainly seemed to exhibit some sociopathic behaviors.  I read it despite an aversion to pop-psych, and I’m glad I did.  Stout describes and delves into sociopathy as the absence of conscience with a number of case studies that may raise frissons of recognition for anyone who has encountered a sociopath (which, given her estimates that as many as 4% of the population is sociopathic, may be more common than we’d think).  This in itself is useful, as encounters with the sociopathic can leave victims questioning their own psychological stability.

Where Stout fell somewhat short, for me, was in her focus on protecting “the rest of us” against sociopaths.  That emphasis is probably helpful, and perhaps the end of the issue, for many readers.  But the most unsettling part of my experience with the probable sociopath (I don’t feel at all qualified to render a certain armchair diagnosis here) in my circle of friends was not knowing how to pin down my own emotions, which included a fair amount of grief for the destruction of numerous relationships and for the person who destroyed them.  Do we feel sympathy for those who, by definition, cannot?  If the sociopath cannot form true friendships, what of those of us with consciences who identified as their friends?  These are questions that Stout makes clear the sociopath would not consider, but people with consciences, even when preyed-upon, likely cannot help but do so.

V.S. Naipaul – A House for Mr. Biswas

I somehow wound up reading A House for Mr. Biswas and listening to a (stupendous!) recording of David Copperfield at the same time, which is a truly interesting experience that I’d never try to repeat.  I finished the Naipaul first.  It belongs in the category of “people with highly objectionable ideas can create great art,” which, incidentally, is right where conventional wisdom appears to have placed it.  It is, true to title, a story about the unlucky, determinedly unhappy Mohun Biswas and his search for both a house of his own and a family to put in it.  The reader knows in advance that this quest is not going to end terribly well, but remains in constant tension about how tragic or comic this resolution will be.  Because almost none of its squabbling characters appear likable, they all become so, especially our protagonist.

I was startled at about 3/4 of the way through to see a magnificent post by Lydia Kiesling go up at The Millions that came very close to pinning my reaction.

Megan Whalen Turner – The Thief

One of my (many) reading resolutions for 2010 is to indulge in more YA skiffy titles.  The Thief proved a good start.

Megan Whalen Turner’s much-praised Attolia books is set in a Grecian-influenced land with three kingdoms: Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis.  Gen, the titular protagonist of this first entry in the series, lands himself in a Sounis prison when his arrogance gets the better of his professional skills.  At the beginning of the book, he is granted a potential reprieve when the King of Sounis finds himself in need of a thief to steal a plot device possibly mythical ancient treasure called Hiamathes’ Gift that could alter the balance of power between the kingdoms.  The King’s magus, his two bickering apprentices, and a lone soldier lead Gen on this coerced quest.

Much of the action of The Thief is consumed in trekking about hostile territory, but that journey builds up a series of reveals — of the kingdoms’ backstory, of the charmingly well-developed mythology of Gen’s people, of the personalities and histories of then men with whom Gen travels, and of Gen’s status as an unreliable narrator.  These revelations build neatly into a twist ending that manages to be fully rewarding even though it’s not surprising.  The ending would be abrupt if The Thief lacked a sequel; happily, this is not the case, and I look forward to adding its successors to my TBR list.

Michael Chabon – Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Chabon’s impassioned defense of genre entertainment first preaches to the choir, then offers it a few classic songs to try.

The debate over whether genre merits serious critical attention and appreciation is an old one, and I’m no longer sure who is giving much heed to those people who still answer “no.”  As a result, the early essays in the collection, in which Chabon tries to reassure the reader that pleasure is not a dirty word, come off as overly vehement.  Yes, it’s annoying that every time a mainstream litfic author ventures into (usually quite well-worn) genre territory, they are unduly praised, while the genre elements are either “transcended” by the luminary’s talent or “elevated” to the level of “parable” — but the people likely to read this collection already know how mockworthy such reviews are.  We are coming to a point when genre partisans (and I include myself) must realize that they have become the behemoth.  In recent years, as has been pointed out endlessly, many of the best-selling books (Harry Potter, the Twilight Saga, The DaVinci Code and the other ones, and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, along with quieter presences like Ken Follett and James Patterson), blockbuster movies (just this year: New Moon, Avatar, Star Trek, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Sherlock Holmes, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), and most-watched TV series (NCIS [this is really the top non-American Idol show in the country? OK.], CSI, Lost, The Mentalist, Battlestar Galactica, True Blood, etc.) have been…genre.  At a certain point, might at least bears the implication of right.  I’m not sure that genre needs defending these days as much as it needs interrogation (see, for instance and just for starters, the extremely objectionable racial politics of Avatar and the newest Transformers).

Where Maps and Legends picks up, then, is in its entries devoted to specific writers or works, which are compelling and detailed without giving away so much as to ruin the enticement.  In particular, I think Chabon may have made me at least respect Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a book I loathed reading.  He may even have convinced me to try Blood Meridian.

If there’s a weakness of the suggestions contained in this middle section of the book, it’s that Chabon’s greatest-hits list is a parade of white dudes.  Chabon is also suspiciously nostalgic for his childhood in the ostensibly then-integrated young city of Columbia, Maryland; I found myself wondering how an African-American contemporary of Chabon’s living in the same place (which sounds like a well-meaning white liberals’ experiment in constructed community) would have recalled it during that time.  My experience of “reading and writing along the borderlands” has been marked genre’s fraught relationship writers (and readers) from marginalized groups, who don’t, so to speak, already own the mainland.  For that reason, Chabon’s final essays, detailing how his Judaism has affected his career as a storyteller, were particularly welcome.  The final entry, “Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Elder Son’s Middle Name is Napoleon,” a performance piece in print, is not to be missed.

Winifred Watson – Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

I’m glad to jump on the post-movie bandwagon for this one. It’s as delightful as the film, combining two of my favorite narratives (an ugly duckling story + the everything-can-change-in-a-day framework). I’ve been trying to think of another mid-life Cinderella tale that doesn’t involve the transformee having to go through a complete nervous breakdown. They’re relatively rare, but enormously satisfying.

I listened to the Frances McDormand-narrated audiobook.  McDormand is, of course, spot on for Guinevere Pettigrew, but she’s equally delightful voicing Miss Pettigrew’s coterie of new friends, particularly Delysia.

The first thing I did after finishing was to poke around the Internet for Winifred Watson’s other novels, which appear to be very out of print.  I hope maybe the rediscovery of Miss Pettigrew will correct that.

Monica Furlong – Wise Child

I kicked off 2010 with a reread of my all-time favorite book, simply because I hadn’t read it in 2009, which may be one of the first years since I got it in the very early 1990s that this has happened.

Wise Child is YA historical fantasy set in medieval Scotland.  Wise Child, so nicknamed in semi-affectionate derision by others in her village for her precociousness, is abandoned by both her mysterious and beautiful mother and her seafaring father.  When the grandmother who cared for her through childhood dies, Wise Child ends up living with Juniper, the vilage’s healer–and its purported witch.

The heart of this book is Juniper’s relationship with Wise Child, which tests Wise Child’s loyalty to her village and her biological mother.  It is this relationship, build up through the often mundane but occasionally extraordinary routines of Juniper’s domestic life and then tested through a series of near-catastrophes, that makes this book such an excellent comfort read.  The underlying messages–be kind, don’t judge unjustifiably, your true family may or may not be composed of people to whom you are related–are commonplace, but the characters are too endearing to ever come off as mouthpieces for the story’s morals.

Wise Child has both a prequel (Juniper) and a sequel (Colman), both of which are lovely but not quite commensurate with the classic status that the original has achieved.  Colman, although the least well-received of the trilogy, is particularly notable as a rare YA book about male feminism.

Briefly, on Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was a rather remarkable reading experience to me: the unraveling of a middle-aged white man rendered by an author who appears to possibly understand how irritated I am to be continually reading lit-fic accounts of the unravelings of middle-aged white men.

Robert Goolrick – A Reliable Wife

Robert Goolrick - A Reliable Wife

I’m back from a necessary hiatus (on posting, not reading).

Goolrick’s homage to the gothic marriage novel over-eggs its prose so much that the effect cannot be forgiven merely because it’s deliberate, but after some time to think it over, I’d say the pudding turns out anyway.  The chief strength of A Reliable Wife is its ability to take work elements from forebearers like Rebecca—the new wife desperate to gain entry into the isolated household and world of a husband with a too-lengthy past; the overprotective housekeeper who refuses to deliver up enough history; the perfectly-timed revelatory character twist that reboots the plot—into something that manages to feel both familiar and fresh.  Some of the more telegraphed plot turns will not be much of a surprise, but the real mystery comes in where the compelling relationship between the two central characters is headed—and that remains a point of suspense until the very (satisfying) end.

I also love the cover, although I’m not sure why.  Maybe something about the way the stark landscape makes the gold look frigid.

Speaking of Rebecca, between A Reliable Wife and The Little Stranger, I wound up visiting it via the Anna Massey-narrated audiobook, which is great.  These three make a fantastic autumn-into-winter paired reading, which might be even better with Jane Eyre tossed in.

Leaving Middlemarch

I finished Middlemarch last week, and now I’m at loose ends.  Appropriately enough, it feels a bit like I’ve spent twenty years in an affectionate but troubled marriage.  Or what I might imagine that would feel like.  Maybe A Cautionary Tale would have made a better subtitle.

Middlemarch.  Good for: slice-of-lifers, fans of sassy phrase-turning, bourgeoisie who think they are hip because they make jokes about the bourgeoisie.  Bad for: people with short attentions spans, the engaged.

Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things

Disclaimer: yes, it’s a shame I haven’t read this before.  If owning a copy for years constitutes any defense, I’d like to assert it.

A bare-bones plot summary—The God of Small Things is about the slow buckling and sudden collapse of a family under the pressures of caste, political upheaval, and personal resentment—makes clear that its story is neither new nor unpredictable.  But this is a story that’s strength in the telling, and especially the voice of its narrator and the dense, telling detail lavished on its setting.

Because so much of the plot turns on the characters’ many transgressions of social strictures, some reviewers suggest that Roy’s language, in which words cleave together and apart (“pocket money” becomes “porketmunny”; “barn owl” is rendered as “bar nowl”), key concepts Demand Capitalization, and rifts of phrase bob up and down throughout the narrative as recurring motifs, is intended to be transgressive too.  I found the language to be intriguingly regressive, the sing-song voice of a traumatized child.  I was glad to see that this seems to be high on the author’s mind as she composed it.

People seem to either love this book or hate it.  Roy’s deliberately repetitive tinkering with word and phrase is going to grate on some readers.  The story is a tragedy, and it’s almost impossible to ignore this fact at any point along the way when a child’s funeral is the highlight of the first chapter.  I’ll simply say that I can see what all the fuss is about—on both sides—but found immersion in the book’s language-play and melancholy to be worthwhile.

I am afraid it’s going to end in tragedy.  There’s both incest vibes and a Marxist movement, and to me these elements each spell novelistic doom.

Lawrence Block – Grifter’s Game

I picked up Grifter’s Game after reading an enthusiastic review on Bookshelves of Doom.  I guess that after The Lies of Locke Lamora, I wasn’t done with stories about con artists getting caught up in jobs that sprout unanticipated complications.

There’s a fair amount of “la la la”-ing necessary to gloss over the extremely skeevy gender and sexuality issues that date the book, but it’s those skeevy elements that make the surprise ending the most successful attempts at deliberate creepiness I’ve read in a while. The ending is also, to be necessarily vague, a great example of bringing a proverbial gun on-stage and making damn sure it gets fired.  (A proverbial gun, that is—the actual gun, and there is one, gets fired much earlier.)

I’m more familiar with homages to noir than with the genuine article, so I was happy to find that I enjoyed Block’s style without even having to maintain ironic distance.  I had been afraid that I would hear a parodic deeply-intoned voice-over in my head.  I didn’t.  When I was hyper-aware of style, it was usually to note and admire how much work gets done by each carefully-selected detail of setting and character.  Spareness never became an excuse for imprecision.

Scott Lynch – The Lies of Locke Lamora

Though I have some quibbles with it, The Lies of Locke Lamora merits the enthusiastic following it’s generated.  Lynch neatly dovetails a caper story, a politics-of-magic fantasy (one of my favorite subgenres), and a mob novel into something slightly greater than the sum of its parts.  The titular hero is the sometimes addled, sometimes superlative brains behind a troupe of con artists known as the Gentleman Bastards.  Locke’s merry band operates in the water-logged city-state of Camorr, a rough analogue of Renaissance Venice that exists in the shadow of five glass towers left by mysterious earlier inhabitants known as the Eldren.  The book begins by tracing a typical, if ambitious job that goes awry when the Gentlemen Bastards find themselves caught up in a struggle for control of Camorr’s underworld.

Probably the chief delight here was Lynch’s worldbuilding.  Camorr is as beautiful and brutal as the deadly glass garden that is one of its most remarkable features.  Although Lynch’s descriptions of the city, its people, and its politics occasionally wander into the overwrought, they’re compelling enough that he can be forgiven.  There are also broad hints of a secret history — the looming glass towers, a complicated pantheon — that appear ripe for exploration in future books.  I was slightly disappointed that, despite numerous flashback chapters, neither this history nor much of Locke’s own personal history were mapped out further, but seven volumes will be a lot to fill.

As for those quibbles: the solution to a show-down between Locke and one of the main villains is so obvious that I kept waiting for a take-back.  I don’t know why it took several hundred pages before the reader could be sure that women had any significant role in the story.  Finally, I wish the torture and fight scenes didn’t threaten to make the book slightly too much for some younger teenagers I know, because the best compliment I could give The Lies of Locke Lamora is that it would be a great fantasy gateway book.

Infinite Things

• More than 1,000 pages of new Murakami.  And that’s how you make the kind of laid-back hipsters who would be Murakami devotees bounce on their toes, I guess.
• Infinite Summer seems like the alternative to the usual thick-Victorian-novels summer (championed by, among other estimable entities, the only book club to which I belong).    I…may be on-board.
• Except that I’ve already plowed through Book I of Middlemarch.

Kage Baker – The Life of the World to Come

This was actually a second read, as I was so enthusiastic about Baker’s Company series that I started deliberately spacing them out, and then . . . realized that I needed to review before moving on.  Oops.  The good news is that I liked The Life of the World to Come even better the second time.

The series—which I can’t recommend highly enough—revolves around the cyborg creations of the very long-lived corporate entity/global conspiracy most often, though not always, known as Dr. Zeus, Inc.  Dr. Zeus discovers a process for conferring immortality, but there are two hitches.  The first is that becoming immortal requires sacrificing the subject’s humanity and turning them into a cyborg.  The second is that Dr. Zeus puts its cyborgs to good use by sending them back in time, where they serve the company by collecting and preserving artifacts (and even populations) that history has incorrectly assumed were destroyed, lost, or missing.  But there is some indication that Dr. Zeus may not prove as perpetual as the living machines it creates: Dr. Zeus’s operatives in the past are never given knowledge of events beyond 2355, even though they routinely receive orders and even visitors from times up until that mysterious date.

One Dr. Zeus operative, a botanist named Mendoza, has turned into something of a thorn in the company’s side.  She generates an anomalous energy, isn’t much of a team player, and has managed to run into the same inamorato in three different time periods . . . even though their encounters have led to his death in the past two. The Life of the World to Come focuses on Mendoza’s mysterious boyfriend, who is, in his latest incarnation, Alec Checkerfield, Seventh Earl of Finsbury and self-styled piratical bad boy of the twenty-fourth century.  The novel delivers a satisfying explanation for the existence of Alec and his predecessors, while opening up new mysteries regarding their possible role in the Silence of 2355, which is rapidly approaching.

The Life of the World to Come breaks from the earlier Company books in that it doesn’t have a historical setting.  Alec is also a very different viewpoint character from the previous cyborg narrators, because he has no sense of who he is in the bigger picture until the end of this installment.  Baker can’t play with the self-deprecating, irony-attuned voices of Mendoza or her quasi-mentor, Joseph, which were part of what made the earlier books so enjoyable for me.  Nevertheless, I loved Alec, and my second read impressed upon me what a neat trick Baker pulls off in presenting both him and the Bowdlerized era in which he grows up.  Alec is clearly much too much for the dumbed-down twenty-fourth century against which he rebels, but he still can’t help but be a product of it, among other influences (in his first encounter with Mendoza, he calls her “babe” at least three times, with zero sense of irony).

The brakes Alec’s environment put on his emotional development and intellectual growth, along with the competing acceleration effect of the artificial intelligence that is Alec’s best friend and protector, keep Alec’s deliberately-constructed heroism from feeling stale or grating.  In fact, much of the action of the book is crammed into the last quarter of it, but it’s relatively easy to overlook this, because there’s no hurry to turn away from the evolution of Alec—or from the first look at the era in which the Silence will occur.

A subplot involving a group of three would-be history buffs, who affect the title of Inklings Nouveau, is by turns wincingly funny and creepy.  Without giving too much away, the Inklings demonstrate how at least one portion of Dr. Zeus operates in the future, and it’s not quite what one would have expected.

(Note: The Company novels can be confusing enough when read in order, so newcomers ought to start with In the Garden of Iden.)

How Much for Just the Round-Up?

• I’d like to hear what Ursula K. LeGuin has to say about the proposed existence of a LeGuin generation.
• Wired on the (temporary) ugliness of ebooks.  I admit that I never was so sensitive to fonts as I became after receiving a Kindle.
• Like the rest of the world, I’ve been googling around for lists of the best Star Trek TOS novels, in hope of finding something faster-paced and less painful than the actual series into which I can channel my movie-inspired Trek attentions.  I sidetracked into this neat post by Vonda N. McIntyre about writing Trek novels in the 1980s.  I also realized that I have something called Spock, Messiah! on my shelves, which I clearly picked up for the title.  Conventional wisdom seems to be that How Much for Just the Planet? is actually the go-to pick.
• Small Beer Press has been having a crazy $1 sale for a while now, but it can’t last forever.  (Can it?)

Maria V. Snyder – Poison Study

I’m loath to break in this blog with a negative review, but apparently not loath enough.

Yelena, the heroine of Snyder’s Poison Study (and its sequels), is facing execution for killing the son of a powerful general when she is offered a reprieve: she will be permitted to live if she agrees to serve as the poison taster for the enigmatic Commander Ambrose, who rules the generic medieval fantasy realm of Ixia.  Yelena’s new job, predictably enough, draws her into political and magical intrigue that only she can resolve.

The good guys are pure, the bad guys are pure evil, and the result is thoroughly uninteresting.  Yelena is a failed attempt at characterization-by-suffering.  It’s probably not spoiling anything to note that there is never an instant that the reader does not know that the crime for which she was sentenced to die could not have been committed in cold blood, and an attempt to turn this information into a big reveal falls utterly flat.  And for all that Yelena is put through, her strengths come too easily: after some study, she happens to excel at poison-tasting, forbidden magic, and a particular physical skill that comes in handy for combat.  Would I have accepted two out of the three as more believable?  We’ll never know.

The conspiracy Yelena discovers is the most promising part of the book, but its perpetrators’ wooden villainy unravels it more effectively than she does.  By the time the book’s big baddie was calling Yelena a “rat-spawned daughter of a demon . . . an incarnation of hell” in their final confrontation, I was snickering.

That said, I wouldn’t rule out reading future work by Snyder.  Poison Study is a first novel, and it shows.  But Snyder clearly spends a lot of thought on her worldbuilding and pacing, and if her characterization and tone even out in the future, I’d gladly check back.

Finally, I’d like to point out that Yelena is repeatedly described as having darker or bronzer skin than the characters around her.  Based upon the cover image, I’d guess this means that Ixia’s inhabitants are descended from Wednesday Addams.