Last week, during my son Jack’s visit, we spent a lot of time in bookstores.
I grudgingly admit to scouring the wastelands of Borders for carrion (as I’ve done before) but we also visited a few bookstores at historic sites like Gettysburg and Harper’s Ferry. Below is my latest book score, and my newest reading list:
In a damn* interesting piece yesterday at Talk To YoUniverse, Juliette Wade discusses how writers can navigate the differing perspectives of characters inside and outside a culture group.
She uses her own experience as a foreigner in Japan who speaks Japanese “too well,” but lays out a set of general principles writers can use to make the meeting of any two cultures seem more authentic, whether they are writing historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, a modern realist tale about culture clash, or even a story about the distinctive culture of a single family.
Enjoy “Insiders and Outsiders.”
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* Taking Mark Twain’s advice. Sans editors.
You’ve come a long way, baby! I mean … um … ladies.
Women have made a lot of progress over the past century, particularly in the Western world. Western readers in the 21st Century have a low tolerance for the sort of overt sexism that readers of previous eras — and in broad stretches of the map even today — would simply take for granted. This puts a lot of pressure on writers of historical fiction and fantasy set in a fictional past. How can we tell a story with female characters which won’t offend (or worse, bore) modern readers, but which also doesn’t seem hokey in its chronological context?
Well, there are at least four approaches to this dilemma…
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From W. H. Auden’s review of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Return of the King, in the 22 January 1956 edition of the New York Times:
I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect.
A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien’s forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light “escapist” reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.
I have a Top Book of 2010. Yes, a book. Singular.
I was considering posting a Top Books of 2010 list. After all, that’s what people do. The New York Times did it, Publishers Weekly did it, The Daily Beast did it, The Huffington Post did it, you get the idea.
And, if all these guys are jumping on the literary soap box, so would I. And I eventually did (see the bold, red text below) but not in the way I expected.
In a recent Guardian rant by Edward Docx (a writer with the odd misfortune of sharing his name with a word processor file extension) the peculiar fantasy that there is a fundamental “difference between literary and genre fiction” is once again stitched together Frankenstein-like from bits of half-dead prejudice, tiresome artifice, and simple humanistic hubris.
It is time to double-tap this stubborn literary zombie and put an end to its virulent intellectual jaundice once and for all.
At the Huffington Post, Rebecca Serle interviews Newberry Prize winning author Kathi Appelt, specifically on the subject of American Fantasy. Not fantasy fiction written by Americans, but fantasy fiction that draws on American locales and imagery.
Regular readers know that I have been all over this like a bear on a beehive with my Story Behind the Story series, explaining how I wanted to step away from the elves and swords and write fantasy that drew on American imagery and textual artifacts the way Tolkien drew on northern European imagery and textual artifacts.
Appelt could not echo my sentiments more clearly than when she says: Continue reading
Since I ran out of the popular weekly Amalgam poems last week, I will compensate by offering two Archaic Definitions:
quillon One of the two arms that form a sword’s cross-guard, the device that protects the swordsman’s hand.
quoin A wooden edge with a handle at the thick end used to adjust the elevation of a [ship’s] gun.
– A Sea of Words : A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales (Third Edition) by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes.
