Member: LisaShapter

Lisa -- The only trilogy I've ever read that I thought was good reading throughout was Piers Anthony's "Tarot" sequence. Of the two trilogies that you mention, I've never heard mention.

On the subject of trilogies, generally, just let me say that I gave up early. I quickly came to expect that at least two thirds of them (I can't help myself!) are nothing more than marketing ploys. As a writer, I also suspect that keeping control of a composition so vast and so populous as "Lord of the Rings" is beyond the ability of most authors.

Tolkein is a handy example: When I was a teenager, I loved Tolkein's books. Now I'm older, I see that in many ways they're just silly. For example: If the eagles flew to Mt. Doom and rescued Frodo and Sam at the end of it all, why didn't Gandalf have the eagles take Frodo and Sam to Mt. Doom in the first place? In that (more sensible) sequence of events, everything between Bilbo's birthday party and the end of the book becomes totally unnecessary. It's not only piss-poor plotting, it's a waste of readers' time.

Is it any wonder everybody hates me?

Deacon

posted by dekesolomon at 8:39 am (EST) on Aug 8, 2011

I used to belong to a book club. They were big on remainders. One month they had Koster's "Tinieblas Trilogy" (3 WW Norton paperbacks) for, like, $4.50 or some such price. I was in grad school at the time and I liked cheap books then even better than I do now. Anyway, the blurb said Koster had won national awards for his work. I'd never heard of him, but I thought I'd give him a try. The Prince kept me glued to my armchair for two days. The Dissertation remains the most fantastic and uproariously funny novel I have ever read. The Mandragon was a big letdown after the first two, but it was readable withal. That's why I recommended the first two but not the third. I didn't want to put you off before you got started. The three novels DO form a sequence, of sorts. They "should" be read in the order I've given you, but frankly I think the third one (Mandragon) is a waste of time. Koster understands Latinos better than any gringo writer I've ever read -- depending on what one makes of Earl Shorris' wonderful books. About Hemingway (whom I adore), I think it helps to realize that Hemingway for the most part didn't write about Latinos. He wrote about Spaniards. I don't think his experience with the Spanish in Spain led him to fully appreciate products brewed in the Latin American gene pool.

My own experience with Latinos is limited. While in the Marines, I spent most of my time in Yuma, AZ. I used to smoke dope and drink beer and carouse with a pretty rough crowd of Latinos (they preferred the term "Chicanos" then). Koster's characters (esp. in "Glass Mountain") wholly comport with my own experience. I loved those guys, but they were also pretty scary. Today, forty years on, I wish I had taken the trouble to learn the language (which is mostly Spanish but isn't, really), but -- being young and selfish -- I didn't. So it goes.

posted by dekesolomon at 3:31 pm (EST) on May 20, 2011

I should warn you about Koster: it helps if you understand Latino men well enough to laugh about the cult of machismo.

posted by dekesolomon at 7:26 pm (EST) on May 18, 2011

If you're gonna read Koster, start with "The Prince." Chase that with "The Dissertation" and be sure, when you read The Dissertation, to read the footnotes IN CONTEXT. If you don't read the footnotes in context, the novel doesn't make any sense.

posted by dekesolomon at 7:18 pm (EST) on May 18, 2011

I grew up on a farm in Iowa. Wanna get bored sometime, just sit around and watch the corn grow. Pulp fiction was one of my favorite escape routes. I'm a kid who loved things like "TRUE Magazine," "Men," and others of the soldier-of-fortune-slays-Komodo-dragons-marries-Asian-princess genre. I loved Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, et al. AND the comic books and sci-fi pulps and paperbacks. Doc Savage, you bet! I must have read L. Sprague de Camp's "Bronze God of Rhodes" a dozen times.

I figure I was luckier than many kids. My mother didn't give a crap what I read as long as I read. She was always happy to see me with any kind of a book because, as long as I had my nose in a book, I wasn't asking questions she didn't want to answer. She actually used to buy me comic books at the supermarket. So if comics and pulp truly were literary slop (I don't deny the possibility), I was a pretty sloppy kid. My biggest problem was trying to find somebody who could talk with me about all the stuff I was reading.

posted by dekesolomon at 7:14 pm (EST) on May 18, 2011

I don't care what anybody writes: as long as it's a rip-snortin' adventure yarn, I'm always glad to read it.

What do you think of R.M. Koster's stuff?

posted by dekesolomon at 11:18 am (EST) on May 17, 2011

You write " I am re-reading the genre's past and trying catch the things that worked in 1960 but would not fly now."

As you reread, don't forget: Of all that stuff from the "Golden Age" of the fifties and sixties, most of it was written for adolescent boys. We who were part of the comic-book crowd were almost the only people reading that stuff back then. "Normal" people just thought it was trash. Maybe it was 8-)

posted by dekesolomon at 3:33 pm (EST) on May 15, 2011

Have you tried Pat Cadigan's "Synners"? Out in the early eighties, a friend of mine sent the book to me with his glowing recommendation. I read it and don't know what to make of it. I guess it won a lot of awards, but (cuss me if you want to) I can't figure why. So it goes. One reader's "great book" is another reader's toilet paper.

As far as Johnny Rico goes -- I read "Starship Troopers" in 1960, right after it came out. I got it from the school library when I was in the seventh or eighth grade (I can't remember exactly). I've read it two or three times since. Now I'm all grown up, I took Heinlein's (mis)use of Rico's supposed Latin heritage as evidence that the context of "Troopers" is set so far in the future that human beings on planet Earth have evolved into a monoculture, of sorts.

Heinlein was an Annapolis graduate. He wanted a career in the Navy more than anything in the world and he had it -- until he went to sea, fell down a ladder (or had some other kind of an accident) and broke his spine. He was paralyzed as a result. His career was over. He took up writing to support his wife and child. He also used his engineer's education to work as an inventor. His back injury made it painful for him to lay in bed, so he set to work and invented the water bed. How much money he made from that and from other inventions I do not know, but he was a brilliant man and much more than a writer. He testified in front of Congress on a couple of different occasions when legislators needed someone who could speak science and explain it in language they could understand.

Heinlein was also naive about a lot of things. He was a square who had an apple-cheeked, Midwestern boyscout's loyalty to America, to democracy, and democratic principles. He professed cynicism but in his heart was a sucker for good ol' Uncle Sam. He liked Mom's apple pie, and all the rest of that maudlin slop. He was active in politics and was a proponent of Libertarian principles. He very much believed in the self-made man, the pioneering spirit, and all of that proto-fascist mythology they fed us while I was growing up. His crippled body drove him to romanticize the swashbuckling hero -- the gallant naval officer, the brave soldier, the dashing lover. He wanted the life of Zorro but was forced to live in a wheel chair, and his perspective was shaped accordingly. It showed up in his fiction in any number of ways. Perhaps Jubal Harshaw (Stranger in a Strange Land) and Lazarus Long (The Past Through Tomorrow) are the two characters who best express what Heinlein aspired to in his dotage.

I quit reading sci-fi back in the middle eighties. The so-called "Golden Age" was over. I had ingested most of the best of it. Azimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and the other greats had pretty much shot their wads by that time. Publishers (inspired by Tolkein) looking for new stuff burned me out with an endless assortment of trilogies, each of them more tedious than the last. In 1986 I went to college and discovered Hemingway, Graves, Conrad, Achebe and a whole raft of others. I'm sure you've heard all the names. Anyway, that's the kind of stuff that fills the hole in my life that sci-fi left vacant. I no longer read the latest and greatest of any genre but dip ever deeper into the vast reservoir of stuff I missed out on when I was a kid.

Jesus Christ! We Americans suffer a lousy education system.

posted by dekesolomon at 12:53 am (EST) on May 15, 2011

Lisa -- Don't give up on Robert Heinlein. Your next read should be "Glory Road" and, after that, The Past Through Tomorrow.

Starship Troopers (I know from reading the LT reviews) must be one of the most misunderstood books on modern shelves. Readers can look at it one way and see Heinlein come to grips with some of the perennial questions that plague American democracy (i.e.: How does one sensibly restrict the franchise so that idiots can't vote?). Then there's the question of capital punishment (in particular) and the question of crime and punishment at large. There's the question: "Is war necessary?" Heinlein obviously thought it sometimes was (as do I). Childhood experience on the playground will teach anybody with eyes to see: the only way to deal with SOME people is to knock them on their asses (Pardon my French).

Another way to look at the book sensibly is to read it as an explication of libertarian political principles applied, through government, to life in a "real world" (if you'll let me use that expression when talking about a sci-fi novel) democratic republic. So strong is the book's message in that regard that I've heard it referred to as a libertarian tract -- which is certainly not inapt.

You may be a libertarian or you may not (obviously, I don't know). Whatever the truth, you may also agree that pure libertarianism doesn't work in practice for the simple reason that (as John Donne wrote) "No man is an island." There are plenty of libertarian die-hards out there who will argue till eternity on that point (Ayn Rand, for one) but for my money, sensible reflection upon the issue leads one to conclude that libertarian absolutists are immature, short-sighted, piggishly arrogant, and extremely foolish. Take that where you will.

"Troopers" aside, I PROMISE you will like "Glory Road." Handsome, dashing, unemployed soldier of fortune meets a brilliant, beautiful, and incredibly hot witch. They get dog locked and whoosh off into an alternate universe to save her realm from evildoers. It's one of Sci-Fi's all-time great romances. Heinlein wasn't known as "The Dean" of science fiction for no good reason.

In "The Past Through Tomorrow," Heinlein was writing what he called "future history," which nothing, more or less, that prognostication as fiction. Nobody can understand Heinlein's later works in relation to his early works without reading "The Past Through Tomorrow." And it's great stuff.

My own romance with Bob Heinlein ended back in the 80s. At that time I'd read virtually every book he ever wrote (dozens of 'em), and I hung on his every word. By and by, however, I came to feel he had become a crippled old man (He started writing because he was an invalid who had to make money somehow.) who wanted desperately to be young and whole and (especially) sexually active again. I can't say I blamed him for that, but he seemed to obsess on it and the books became overly large and even formulaic. I quit reading him a few years before he quit writing, but I don't believe I missed anything worthwhile.

Best.

Deacon

posted by dekesolomon at 4:32 pm (EST) on May 12, 2011

Dear Lisa,

I'm so sorry for not having written to you in a while. School has started and, well, I've just had A LOT to do. Welcoming/Introducing/Helping/etc. this year's new nanostudents, my own studies (as always) and I've also been moving, from an old mansion I previously shared with a group of other students, to a smaller apartment that's closer to school.

What's now on my reading list is books on cell biology and multidimensional analysis (is that the correct English term?). And I have soo many unread fiction books in my bookcase... *sigh* ;)

/Linnea

posted by LadyDarbanville at 2:46 pm (EST) on Sep 10, 2010

I still drive to a real, live bookstore to browse, too.

We have a Goodwill used bookstore left, but the antiquarian one downtown - gone. And many of the independents - used to have lots of them in this city.

Islandia - my gosh haven't thought of that title in years.

posted by JannyWurts at 5:44 pm (EST) on Aug 26, 2010

Thanks so much - if it's on Amazon I can pursue it that way.

I can imagine your library is amazing, and I can also imagine the impact the internet has had on antiquarian book work - must make it much easier and much harder at the same time.

posted by JannyWurts at 9:42 am (EST) on Aug 26, 2010

I have not read that book - sounds fascinating. Is it hard to find?

posted by JannyWurts at 1:54 pm (EST) on Aug 23, 2010

"Start small now. Persist. Pages and practice add up, often imperceptibly."

Starting small is exactly what I intend to do and hopefully it will lead beyond the "starting"-stage. Like you said, pages and practice add up, I just don't have that much of either yet. What I do have is a number of songtexts (I play a little guitar), dialogues that lack in continuity and an almost finished sci-fi short story (I wrote that one in a bout of inspiration and then couldn't really get back to the style, or "atmosphere", of the writing :P ).

/Lady D.

posted by LadyDarbanville at 8:45 pm (EST) on Aug 21, 2010

Hi!

Thanks for the tip on the novel contest, will definitely check that out.

Well, sometimes a certain part from my stories play stuck on repeat in my head, and then I do write it down but I hardly ever get any further than that. Though, at the moment, I don't really have the time to give my writing a go. But I have no doubt I will give it a shot sometime in the future, like when I've finished school (which is another four years yet *sigh*. I just had to choice one of the longest programs!).

/Linnea

posted by LadyDarbanville at 7:50 pm (EST) on Aug 17, 2010

oh wow. you have a ton of books. tons and tons. your own personal library. i don't have room for so much as one box! lol i had a bag of a dozen books a couple years ago that i gave away to the library because i had no room for them. had to make room for textbooks. it's all i have on my shelf - a dozen thick expensive textbooks. and a few old anne mccaffery hardcovers i picked up at a library sale.

posted by spoiledfornothing at 1:39 pm (EST) on Aug 11, 2010

oh well! and you have whole boxes of science fiction books? :O

posted by spoiledfornothing at 7:15 pm (EST) on Aug 8, 2010

hi! what are you reading? i am trying to figure out something science fiction to read. nothing is appealing to me.

posted by spoiledfornothing at 5:55 pm (EST) on Aug 6, 2010

thanks for the invite - I need all the friends I can get - and anyone who likes Pirandello and Stanley Weinbaum is OK by me. Hopefully now you will feel obligated to amuse me with clever patter or reading suggestions from time to time :)

posted by bookstopshere at 5:13 pm (EST) on Aug 5, 2010

Dear Lisa

Misplacing stars, haha, indeed a serious problem. ;) The conclusion being that the universe is a much safer place when the two of us stay away from the navigational officer-position aboard spaceships!

Nice to see you have gotten a couple of short stories published. Definitely hope you'll get to publish novels one day. I myself have this dream about being an authour one day - my head is filled with stories and characters I want to share with others, but I have serious doubts in my ability to put them into writing. So for now I just stick to daydreaming 90% of the day and talking out loud to fictional characters while walking on the street.

All the best!

/Linnea

posted by LadyDarbanville at 6:00 pm (EST) on Aug 4, 2010

Hi!

Thanks for your friends invitation. :) Always nice to get to know people reading the same kind of books as I. Also noted you're member of the Astronomy & Astrophysics group, which is kind of fun since I ALMOST started studying just that. Ended up at the Engineering Nanoscience-program instead. X) I wonder if my taste in science have anything to with my taste in fiction...or vice verse.

/Linnea

posted by LadyDarbanville at 4:12 pm (EST) on Aug 2, 2010

Thanks, Lisa! Hope you're having a great week! Anne B

posted by AnneBrooke at 12:49 am (EST) on Jul 29, 2010

That surprises me - especially with all the writers on LibraryThing. Typerwriters are beautiful things. Hope you have a good day.

posted by sojourner8 at 3:00 pm (EST) on Jul 27, 2010

I dig your typewriters - major fan of them myself. There's nothing like the sounds of keys hitting paper and clicking back again.

posted by sojourner8 at 12:10 pm (EST) on Jul 24, 2010

Thanks for the add, Lisa - lovely to meet you here :)) Anne B

posted by AnneBrooke at 5:37 pm (EST) on Jul 21, 2010

Hi Lisa
It's great to be asked to be your friend. I guess you love books too - what are you reading now? I'm reading the Osiris Ritual by George Mann which is ok-ish.
Chhrissie

posted by charmella56 at 6:40 pm (EST) on Jul 20, 2010

I guess I don't find stuff on the screen finished. That may be because I usually leave blank lines (like this: _________) for names whenever a new character shows up and comments on the sides for things to look up later. I highlight lines, paragraphs, that I know I need to fix later. None of that looks finished to me. ;)

It also may be I grew with the computer and never actually used a typewriter. In fact, that is probably why I prefer to just write on word. I have only rarely used other things.

posted by spoiledfornothing at 11:12 am (EST) on Jul 20, 2010

I read many authors for the concepts they are working with rather than the writing they are doing. Starship troupers falls in this category as does most of Van Vogt and others.
A few books I read for both the concept and the writing. Blish's description of the bridge on Jupiter in Cities in Flight falls in this category and I re-read it yearly.
Cheers

posted by Gord.Barker at 1:28 pm (EST) on Jul 15, 2010

Hey thanks for the invite.

posted by spoiledfornothing at 5:40 pm (EST) on Jul 5, 2010

thanks for responding - I'll hold off accepting for a while and see how we get along.

If I friended everyone whith whom I shared a group my friends list would encompase most of LT! 28 books is reasonable start but less than the 10% cuttoff I normally think of as being noteworthy.

'fox

posted by reading_fox at 12:01 pm (EST) on Jul 5, 2010

If you are randomly going to send me a friend request, some indication of why will be appreciated.

'fox

posted by reading_fox at 5:32 am (EST) on Jul 5, 2010

Hi Lisa! Thanks for saying hello; I'm happy to be your friend! I have to admit I've hardly entered any of my library yet, which is about 5000 volumes, of which about 3500 are feminist F/SF. And now we're planning a move to Vilcabamba, Ecuador, so GOK when I'll get to it.

I looked at your last two comments in the fora. Re men in feminist F/SF, Chip Delaney is about it, for me. Heinlein? I Will Fear No Evil? To Sail Beyond the Sunset? Maybe... ;-) And The Dispossessed is still my favorite Le Guin. Her new collection The Birthday of the World is excellent too...

All the best!

posted by jeremyg at 11:27 pm (EST) on Jul 4, 2010

I'm sure there's no lapse in taste, especially since you haven't entered all your library! As I said at the FSF group where you found me, I'm devoted to Sheri S. Tepper (but you have to be careful about your first; she has written some not-so-great books) and David Weber (I actually eat up all the military descriptions, but they are easily skipable). I see that you love U.LeG, and I mostly don't get her. That's my lapse in taste.
I also haven't been able to read much classic scifi. I came to the genre late and just haven't gotten to it although I did read Heinlein 40 or so years ago. I'll confess up front that I can't read A Canticle for Leibowitz. That takes me out of respectibility for lots of folks, so maybe I should have confessed that first.
I was also looking at Carol Berg's Transformation when you commented. Is it worth my spending a precious credit at pbs? I'll eagerly await your answer!
Peggy

posted by LizzieD at 10:59 pm (EST) on Jul 4, 2010

Hi, Lisa. Sure! I'm happy to have a new friend, especially one who reads femscifi. I notice, though, that we don't have any of my favorites of the sub-genre in common. What gives?
Peggy

posted by LizzieD at 10:35 pm (EST) on Jul 4, 2010

I'm a little puzzled - we only have 4 books in common in our libraries, and my interest in Fantasy and Science fiction is....well....zero.

posted by lapassionata at 12:53 pm (EST) on Jul 4, 2010

"UTOPIA

You think there is no Utopia?
My dear, you're suffering Myopia!
For in this Real World can live
The option to take or to give.
If you give all your money, your fortune might wane,
But in giving your love, you can only gain.
For the Source of Love remains so vast
You can give it all, yet the wealth will last.
When Love is returned, joy has no limit
Only your holding back can dim it.
Your may not hear me, but I must tell
Your create your own Heaven or Hell.
The distance is short, a mere foot apart
The greatest journey from the head to the heart."

- Gurunam Kaur Khalsa

posted by theoldman at 11:59 am (EST) on Feb 19, 2009