Cammykitty's 2013 Categories gone mad

Since we decided not to set a specific number of categories for this year's challenge, I started with a nice sensible 13. Then I wanted to add one more category. And one more category. And one more category. It's time to stop adding categories and start the challenge!!!

I'm planning on reading 5 books (4 in ten categories) for a total of 80 books. I'm going to keep the books-over-400-pages-count-as-two rule since I'm planning on attempting the Count of Monte Cristo group read. That book is "thick enough to stun an ox" if I can steal a phrase from Laurie Anderson.




Half of these should come from books I already own. Sigh, this is the hard part of the challenge for me, and it shouldn't be because I own tons of good, as of yet unread books.




Not sure if I'm really going to offer myself a carrot for reaching the off the shelf goal though!!! I'm so bad, I don't deserve a carrot!

The categories are:
1. Graphic Novels
2. Folklore/Fairytales/Mythology
3. Young Adult & Middle Grade Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror
4. Young Adult & Middle Grade other
5. Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
6. Tiptree Awards/Tiptree Short List
7. Books recommended in 500 Great Books by Women
8. Mysteries/True Crime
9. Histories/Historical Fiction
10. Short Story collections
11. Biography/Autobiography/Anthropology
12. Animals, including humans
13. Mexican Authors
14. In the Spanish Language
15. Vintage and Classics (over 50 years old)
16. Begged, Borrowed or Stolen - Off wishlist, loaned to me, group reads and Early Review books
17. Books randomly picked by LT's "Random Books from Cammykitty's Library" display
18. Books that feed the writer's brain

As for group reads, ha ha!!! I've scheduled myself pretty solid! Let's see what I really do.

Jan/Feb Devil in the White city tandem w victoriapl
Feb Zoo City
March-May The Count of Monte Cristo
April Old Filth???
May Kavalier and Clay
June Women Authors
June The Bloody Chamber tandem w tanglewood - lkernagh?
July perhaps Portrait of a Lady
August The Heart is a Lonely Hunter w ALWINN and luvamystery65 and ?Ridgeway?
October 2666???
December perhaps Un Lun Dun

Category 1: Graphic Novels
1. Bone, Vol. 1: Out From Boneville
2. Blacksad: Silent Hell
3. Fun Home
4.
5.

Planned
Persepolis

Possibilities:
Maus
Pyongyang by Guy Delisle

Category 2: Folklore/Fairytales/Mythology
1. The Prince of Annwn which is the first book in The Mabinogion Tetralogy
2. The Bone Tiki
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
The Tain
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Silver Birch, Blood Moon
In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss

Possibles:
Nine Lives: The Folklore of Cats
Trickster Makes the World
The Search for Delicious

Category 3: Young Adult & Middlegrade Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror
1. Sabriel
2. Sabriel
3. The Changeover by Margaret Mahy
4.
5.

Planned:
Ready Player One

Category 4: Young Adult and Middle Grade Other
1. Steel Pelicans
2. Slide the Corner by Fleur Beale
3. The She
4. Under Shifting Glass
5.

Planned
Evvy's Civil War

Possibles:
After by Francine Prose
When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune

Category 5: Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
1. A Red Heart of Memories
2. Zoo City
3. Wolfhound Century
4.
5.

Planned:
The Lions of Al-Rassan
Shadow Valley
The Name of the Wind
Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

Conjure Wife could of course be moved to classics.

Possibilities:
Might do group read of Un Lun Dun in December.

Category 6: Tiptree Awards and Short List.
The Tiptree Award is an award for science fiction/fantasy that explores gender. It's funded by bake sales. Seriously.
1. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever odd-numbered stories
2. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr
Troll: A Love Story
A Woman of the Iron People
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
Mockingbird by Sean Stewart

Of course I can move Her Smoke to classics and the bio to bios, which I might do. There are tons of books I'd like to fit into this category, most I already own.

Possibilities.
The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer
The Children Star by Joan Slonczewski
Writing the Other
The Knife of Never Letting Go

Category 7: Books recommended in 500 Great Books by Women
1. Saints and Strangers
2.
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
Emma
Kindred
The Kitchen God's Wife

Possibilities:
Yoruba Girl Dancing
Stones for Ibarra
cold comfort farm
The Story of Avis
Possessing of Secret Joy
Breakthrough by Mercedes Valdivieso
Pride of the Family
Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South
A War of Eyes and Other Stories
Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism
Forged under the sun
Call Home the Heart

Category 8: Mysteries/True Crime
1. Gone Girl
2. Gone Girl
3. Black Irish
4. Bimbos of the Death Sun
5.

Planned:
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane

Category 9: Histories/Historical Fiction
1. Devil in the White City w victoriapl jan/feb
2. Day of Tears by Julius Lester
3. The Birchbark House
4.
5.

Planned:
Copper Sun
Flygirl
The Book Thief
Code Name Verity

Possibilities:

Category 10: Short Story Collections
1. The Miniature Wife and other stories
2. Errantry by Elizabeth Hand
3. 1st tenth of The Weird: Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
4.
5.

Planned:
The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard
After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

Category 11: Biography/Autobiography/Anthropology
1. The Heart Knows Something Different
2. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
Mighty Hard Road
Anything We Love Can Be Saved
Corpse Walker
The Professor and the Madman

Possibilities:

Category 12: Animals, including humans (behavior nonfiction)
1. Help for Your Fearful Dog: A Step-by-Step Guide to Helping Your Dog Conquer His Fears by Nicole Wilde
2.
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
Stalking Irish Madness
Lads Before the Wind

Possibilities:
Frankenstein's Cat

Category 13: Mexican authors
1. Nothing, Nobody: The voices of the Mexico City Earthquake by Elena Poniatowska
2. Vlad by Carlos Fuentes
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes

Possibilities:
Cleopatra Dismounts by Carmen Boullosa
Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro
The Empty Notebook by Josefina Vicens
Roberto Bolano

Category 14: In the Spanish Language
1. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
2.
3.
4.

Planned:
Aunt Tula
The Censors

Possibilities:

Category 15: Vintage and Classics (over 50 years old)
1. Vathek
2. The Count of Monte Cristo
3. The Count of Monte Cristo
4.
5.

Planned:
The Portrait of a Lady

Possibilities:
Pierre and Jean
The Razor's Edge

Category 16: Begged, Borrowed or Stolen - Off wishlist, loaned to me, group reads and Early Review books
1. The Book Thief
2. The Book Thief
3. The Count of Monte Cristo
4. The Count of Monte Cristo
5.

Planned:

Way too many possibilities to list

Category 17: Books randomly picked by LT's "Random Books from Cammykitty's Library" display
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

How can you plan random?

18. Books to feed the writer's brain
1. Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa
2.
3.
4.
5.

Planned:
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

another window reserved for my comments

and yet another reserved for my comments

#1-2 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. This one actually was worth being #1,658 on the library waiting list. I tend to avoid the latest hot everyone-is-reading-it book, but since everyone actually was reading it and most of you LT friends that have already read it rated it highly, I thought I'd try. Loved it! I thought I knew what was going to happen, but I didn't. I feel this one is a shhhh, don't talk about it book. Like "The Crying Game," eventually there's going to be a spoiler out there that will be difficult to avoid.

I think it's totally appropriate to count this as two books since it is a "he said, she said" kind of book. Great way to get your challenge started off!

>22 cammykitty: I don't normally read mystery/suspense novels, but I gave that one a try and was glad I did, really good plot twists.

Glad you finally got here! I have Gone Girl on my list for next year also.

@23 - yup, it is two books. :) Ms. Flynn would agree.
@24 It's super twisty!!!
Betty, I'll be interested to see what you think about it. I'm thinking it's the characterizations that really makes it tick.

And I also have Gone Girl on my TBR mountain for next year. I love good plot twists :-)

Yay, Katie is here! Nice to see you have jumped right in and cleared your first "2 books" for the challenge. ;-)

I am still not sure I want to tackle Gone Girl, although it would be the perfect book for my 'book buzz' category, what with all the talk here on LT about this one..... I will need to think on that some more.

You are going to be soooo dangerous to me in 2013.... way too many categories I am interested in!

Hi Katie, glad to see you over here and already with a couple of books under your belt. I definitely want to read Gone Girl before the spoilers get out there, so I guess I better put my name on the very, very long waiting list at the library.

Well, hello, and good luck with the Books off the Shelf! It is a lot harder than it seems since we are constantly showered with ideas of newer shinier books. You've done very well with creating your categories, though - all set for the 2017 challenge already. :) Shedloads of great potential reads over here - I foresee lots of bookbullets.

Yay, nice to see you here! Looks like you have lots of good reading planned. I'm especially interested in your fairy tales/folklore category, since I'm always on the lookout for good retellings. I agree with you about Gone Girl -- it's a pretty addictive read!

27-31 Yup! I decided to skip right over 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. I'm guessing I can live to be 194 years old that way, right?

Glad to be dangerous & hit people with lots of book bullets!!! We're going to have a great 2013! And I'll keep my mouth shut about Gone Girl. Don't want all that book buzz to spoil it. ;)

Nothing like an extra category or two.

or three or four. ;)

Well that didn't take long. My first official book bullet of the 2013 challenge. I've been resisting Gone Girl, but I'm a sucker for a twist.

LOL!!! I'm honored to be the first person to get ya Sandragon! Although, I think I've had help. I'm sure the Gone Girl bullets have been whizzing around your for a few months.

Nope. It's all your fault. :o)
I've heard lots of brouhaha about Gone Girl, and I knew it was some kind of thriller/mystery, but I wasn't too interested until you said the magic words, 'twist'.

@37 Sorry... not!!! It's plenty twisty. Like I said, I didn't see it coming. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

#3 The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzales. This is my latest ER book. It's a mixed bag of short stories. Some are quite good, but some seemed to be very typical of the genre - science fiction/fantasy/horror. It ended with a zombie story - groan! You've got to do something really creative with zombies to get anything but a groan out of me - see the opening story of Maureen McHugh's After the Apocalypse if you want to know what kind of originality it takes to get me to approve of a Zombie story. Zombie's are so "in" now that I'll thumb down any of them unless they have a unique angle.

The stories I really did enjoy from The Miniature Wife were in his "meritorious life" series. These stories are fake encyclopedia biographies that are very unique. Great world building in a tight word limit. My official review is here http://www.librarything.com/work/book/91756811 if you are curious. I'll probably discuss this book along with Three Messages and a Warning at the next Diversicon. Gonzales is Mexican-American, not Mexican, and his dual heritage is strongly evident in his work.

#4 Steel Pelicans Fast paced adventure from New Zealand. Cool artwork, explosives, smugglers, boys boarding school complete with hazing, and even a romance (involving ducks, but we can't have everything, can we?). Quite an enjoyable read. My copy was published in New Zealand and I was surprised at how many things I found that I knew an editor would change for a US market. We don't have 4-wheel bikes, we have ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) and we don't eat chippies but we pig out on potato chips - which aren't to be confused with New Zealand chips which we would call French fries. As for the plot SPOILER: I was thinking a US audience wouldn't care about smuggled cigarettes. There'd have to be a meth lab somewhere. :) Thanks avatiakh for this book bullet! I'm planning on trying this on the boy we've been talking about.

Had to laugh at the Myth Buster reference. That obviously is the same in both countries. "Jamie likes big boom."

#5. Bone, Vol. 1: Out From Boneville starts the graphic novels category. Kids love this book. While I was reading it, I realized all the gag lines were familiar because I used to work with a boy who had autism who would memorize video lines in particular and quote them out of context or to be funny constantly. Sometimes the line came from books, but usually movies. Well, as I was reading this, I realized that this book was part of his source material. Since he did this obsessively and to avoid having to come up with his own thoughts and create his own conversations, it wasn't a good thing. I didn't like Bone so much, and I think this is part of why. Spoiler city combined with an unpleasant connection. (I'm fond of the kid, but not his disability.)

That aside, I still don't think I would've liked Bone much. All of the problems our heroes were experiencing were caused by Phoney Bone. Fine, except Phoney Bone is a self-centered, corrupt wanna-be politician with only one slightly-- and I do mean slightly-- redeeming quality. He doesn't want anyone picking on his cousins if he can help it. However, he never admits that his cousins would have no one bothering them if it weren't for him. He also never adjusts his behavior. Perhaps if I had the patience to follow the series he'd grow, but if you asked me, I'd say feed him to the rat bastards! Which would end the series practically before it even started.

So pleased that you liked Steel Pelicans. I've liked all the books by Des Hunt that I've read though this one felt more for an older audience than usual. We have a high tax on cigarettes here to discourage people from buying them, the last budget approved will see them cost about $20 per pack by 2016.

Aha! We've got a lot of taxes stuck onto cigarettes but it isn't nearly as prohibitive as that. We'd have cigarette smugglers too at that rate. As it is, I don't know how people can afford to smoke. Several states in the US (Virginia to name one) are heavily dependent on tobacco money. We've banned them in public places here in Minnesota but as long as cigarettes are a major part of our economy, I can't see us getting to far toward getting rid of them. FYI - The Minnesota attorney general sued the tobacco companies and won a large settlement that the legislature at that time earmarked for smoking cessation programs and tobacco education. Then Jesse Ventura (the wrestler) was elected governor and the money just became part of the general state budget. Nothing tobacco/drug/addiction related was ever done with it. Grrr!!! & yes, I really did enjoy Steel Pelicans.

I've got a friend here who taught in Samoa for awhile and I'll have to ask her if it's a coincidence that "pato" means duck in both Samoan and in Spanish. It's also an insult in Spanish, but one of my friends insists that every word in Spanish has two meanings - one literal and one insulting/vulgar. My only real complaint about it was the Epilogue. It skipped through so much time, and if he hadn't done that he could've given us more adventures with the three boys. I liked Afi a lot and would've read more about him.

I know my graphic novels category is going to be a 'hit and miss' mix of books as I am new to the GN genre. Sounds like I would probably have the same experience you did with Bone, Vol 1, Katie so I am very happy to lower that one further down the candidates list - if it is even on the list..... there are so many GN series out there it is hard for me to keep track of them!

Lori, I'll be hit and miss with it too. I love Watchmen but haven't read many, and I remember Watchmen being a learning experience. I'm not used to 'reading' the pictures, and that one tells a lot in the pictures. We can help each other out with this category!

Watchmen is one I've never had an inclination to read, as I didn't know it existed until the movie, and I found the movie utterly miserable. Since comic fans seem to have loved the movie, I have less than zero inclination to pick them up. I read a couple Bone comics when I was younger and I enjoyed them. My comic reading tends towards fantasy/sci-fi-fantasy, fairy-tale "related," and dystopias, with some horror tossed here & there. There's tons of fabulous things out there!

Lori, I am going to be trying my first Graphic novel in 2013, I'll be new to the genre too. I chose The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

> 45 - Agreed Katie. I think we will be helping each other out over the course of the year as I will be new to 'reading' the pictures, too. I am in the process of tweaking my rating system to include artistry and other factors that can impact my enjoyment of a GN novel that do not crop up in other books. Still have to work out the finer details on that.......

> 47 - Cheli, I am going to look forward to your thoughts on Hugo Cabret. That is one of the GN's on my candidates list!

Poly - Don't go by the movie of Watchmen. I had read it before I saw the movie and went with a bunch of friends that hadn't read it first. They found it incomprehensible. I enjoyed it, but understood totally why they found it incomprehensible. If you don't like Batman too, then go with your instinct. Superheros probably aren't your thing then.

Cyderry & Lori - Hugo Cabret is awesome!!!! You'll really enjoy that one. I don't really consider it a GN though, more a heavily illustrated novel or a picture book on steroids. I suppose it really is a GN though, but it certainly doesn't follow the comic book format.

Hugo Cabret is great. Just make sure you 'read' the pictures as well as the text.

>49 cammykitty: I didn't find it incomprehensible, I just found it bad. It was absurdly dark & dreary, not in a pleasing stylistic way, but as in, let's all go out on a vicious murderous rampage fraught with rape and being nasty, just because we can. I have no problem with violence in movies/books in general, but the way that movie handled everything, it was just, disturbing and I want no part of it.

I've read various old, original superhero comics, from back in the 60s - my mom's old ones were in the kitchen island at my grandparents' old house, and I'd pull some out to read on visits. They were fun, but nothing extra special. I won't touch most modern superhero comics due to the rampant misogyny in them. I just can't stomach all the breasts bigger than heads and nearly women all nearly nude and in the absurd poses. I'll read things like Hellboy, where it's not like that (I'm not sure if he's technically classed "superhero" or not, but he's certainly not the original model, anyway), but none of the "mainstream superhero" kind of thing. That's one part of why the fantasy/horror/dystopia/apocalyptic ones have such appeal. They have good stories, they don't feel the need to attempt to pull in readers with the sexualization of women, but with good stories & art.

@51 - Probably pass then - Rorshack is one of the darker "superheroes" out there. He kills dogs after all.

Eh it's not that "dark" bothers me, but the movie was far more than dark, it was utterly morbid and had an atmosphere of like -want to hurt people and maybe myself for no reason at all- kind of deal, I don't know how to explain it properly. But suffice it to say that movies don't ever bother me, put me in a bad mood, etc, but I watched that and was like ...so this is supposed to be some sort of torture device, or...?! ugh. Sorry but I just don't "get it," as in, the appeal of such...yeah. And I have a friend or two on another site who really enjoys it, so I know people do, I just, don't see it.

Hi Katie! I'm not joining the 2013 challenge group, because I was a complete failure at my 12 and 12 and it's hard to keep up with this one AND the 75 group. However, I've starred your thread, because I always enjoyed your book (and dog) comments.

I just found a list of the books in 500 Great Books by Women and I will promptly order it. What a wonderful combination of classics, stuff I've never hear of in my life, and stuff I've heard of, but never gets mentioned anywhere. Also that Tiptree award - I'm going to add that to my awards spreadsheet. I feel like I may have heard of it, but never really knew what it was all about. Interesting.

@54 Dors - I'll be joining the 75ers group too, so I'll see you there for sure. I'm sure you've heard of the Tiptree at least from me. It's not a very well known award, but it is a serious one with some very good books as winners. It's a silly one too. The recipient receives a check, has to wear a tiara (even Joe Haldeman) and most important of all, they receive quality chocolate. Award mythology says Ursula LeGuin insisted the prize must include chocolate.

Isn't 500 Great Books by Women interesting! I've had it for years, but haven't made much use of it except the first few years I had it. It will keep me going for a long time!!!

If Ursula K. LeGuin said it, she must be obeyed.

I'm really intrigued by the Tiptree Award now; I need to check it out.

Lots to catch up on here, just thought I'd add my tuppence worth to Watchman debate (not seen and never plan to see the film btw as no faith in director or what they've changed) Alan Moore tried to make a comic book to stretch the media/genre & at the time it was groundbreaking. I'd expect the book to be much more nuanced than the film. I don't like superhero comics generally but this one is definitely worth a read IMHO

@56 Yes! She definitely must be obeyed!!! She was one of the women who was behind making the award a reality rather than a "we should" conversation at a convention.

@57. What you said. Very much more nuanced than the film. For example, that rape. Was it??? And all the contrasts - Rorschach vs the Comedian - you had one superhero that never cracked a smile and one that hid behind humor. I would certainly be cautious about calling Watchmen sexist or misogynistic, not that anyone did. It's got some odd little gender twists in it, ones you might not even see if you aren't someone who "reads" the pictures. It is actually a very literary and subtle novel in its own way.

#55 - Tiaras and chocolate. Nice!

How exciting that you'll join the 75 group. Well, I'll follow you there then!

Sounds good!!! I can't wait until 75 - 2013 starts!

I've considered joining the 75 group as well, but I'm not sure I can keep up with a group that huge on top of all the others I belong to.

>61 StevenTX: I feel the same. Like, I want to join all the good fun groups but... there's just no way! haha. I chose Club Read to join for 2013 as the annual "generic reading" group, on top of Category Challenge and ROOT, and eventually I'll be starting my 1001 Books thread also... Yeah, too many good groups!! hahaha

Didn't realize there was a 1001 books group. Is that new??? I'm a little worried about drowning in the 75ers as well, but they do seem to have great group reads. I'll give it a try, but may find I'm a one challenge grrl. What is ROOT?

ROOT is the new name of "BOMBS" (Books Off My Book Shelves) for 2013, standing now for Read Our Own Tomes, and is for challenging to read X many off your shelves, as we all know how they just keep on piling up! lol. The 1001 group is actually pretty old in fact, though I just joined it myself more recently.

#63 - I have a thread in the 1001 group, but never remember to update it. It's been around for a while, but it doesn't seem to be wildly active, compared to the 75 group.

I think you'll be a lovely addition to the 75 group, and I promise you won't drown! Unless your thread becomes wildly popular. Then you probably will drown. : )

ROOT sounds like just the kind of group I need--one that won't send me off to the bookstore on a buying binge. I've just joined.

The 1001 Group was the first group I joined in LT. I haven't followed it too closely lately, but I may still be the leader in the number of books read from the list (not that it's a competition, but we do compare numbers).

Ah! I was in ROOT when it was called BOSS. That's why I have the Books off shelf ticker in my category challenge - it's both a reminder to read my own books, and as sort of a tribute to that group.

I have a 1001 list and from time to time check off books. I don't go seeking those books but seem to hit them anyway - I'm sure I haven't come even close to your numbers, Steven.

& Dors! I'll shout out for a lifeline if I start to drown!!! I'm really looking forward to 75ers. I used to be intimidated by that #, but I read more than 75 last year to my surprise, and I notice that most of the 75ers don't have tickers right at the top of their threads. To me, that means it's the reviews & talk, not the numbers that are important.

Katie - I also think you will enjoy the 75 group. I joined the group for the first time this year and the only hard part about the group - for me anyways - is that I am rather compulsive about reading - OK, skim reading! - all of the threads, which has made me a lurker on a lot of threads because it is impossible to comment on all the threads, all of the time - there is just not enough time in the day for that! So long as you are not compulsive like that, I think you will swim along nicely with the group and not drowned in it.

I do try to read keep current on threads!!! I do get compulsive, but none of us would get any reading done if we always felt we had to keep up and comment. I lurk a bit too - and silly me, if I don't get comments, I assume it's because no one read them! Lots of us lurk off and on, & it would actually be annoying if everyone felt they had to say something all the time. We'd need a like button then, and this ain't no stinkin' facebook. ;) So, I'll give myself a firm talking too - no compulsiveness on 75ers!

good for you. I tried to lurk a bit in the 75 a year or so ago, and just couldn't keep up. I tend to lurk on some threads too. Or it seems silly just too agree with what the previous person said. I am going to try between Christmas and New Years to find some time to go through each thread once to decide which ones to star and follow this year. There's one I've lurked through for 2 years and I don't read the same type of books at all, so I've decided to abandon that thread this year. But I'm kind of afraid I'll miss a good book recommendation.

But I'm kind of afraid I'll miss a good book recommendation.

Welcome to the club..... that is one of the main reasons for why I am always behind on threads! ;-)

Hah!!! Miss a good book recommendation!!! I'm so riddled with book bullets, I'd be lucky to miss a recommendation or two!. ;) Yes, I know what you both mean but my WL is about to surpass my actually library plus "read but unowned" combined and that's after I culled it down by deleting any book that didn't have a 4 star or higher rating.

#6 Slide the Corner by Fleur Beale is pure boy bait! Poor Greg Mannering is the son of two doctorates - the only one of three kids not to be brilliant. To make matters worse, what he loves and is brilliant at is not something his parents value - cars. So he goes and gets himself a gig as a mechanic/rally car co-driver.

Perfect book for the male reluctant reader! Fast paced, huge parental conflict, cars cars cars! As for the female reader, I'm pleased that the author included some female characters that were just as crazy about the cars as the males, and just as talented with cars as well. I'll be finding a student to pass this one on to.

Ha, thing I forgot to say about Slide the Corner that DS will want to know - one of the cars was a red, tricked-out Mini.

Yesterday, I gave Slide the Corner to a 6th grade boy that struggles with reading (bilingual). Today, he told me he'd started reading it. I asked him if it was too hard for him and he said "No, I've been borrowing my dad's Ipad to check words on dictionary.com."

LOL!!! Isn't that great!

That's awesome!

@76 :) sure is!!!

I can't believe I'm right on track for this challenge. I figured out I had to read 7 books a month to keep up, and here I am done with book 7 Errantry by Elizabeth Hand. This collection of short stories ran hot and cold, and I think it would've benefited by slow reading, meaning a story every few weeks. Since it was an ER book, I read a story or two a day. Some of the unusual words or images she used were repeated from story to story, and that got annoying. I never would've noticed if I had left more time between stories.

This collection is "interstitial." "Interstitial" was a small movement within the fantasy/science fiction community. Works that are interstitial often combine genres. They are subtle. The fantasy element may be used more as symbolism than as a plot element. I'm wavering between giving the book three stars and three and a half stars. In general, the collection was quiet and death-centric. Some of the stories were thought provoking and beautiful, but some of them didn't go beyond the banal or the beautifully imagistic. I'd recommend this collection for people who like poetry mixed in with their fantasy, and don't expect magic to shake the earth.

So pleased that you enjoyed Slide the Corner, and I hope that your student enjoys it too. Love that he is looking up words on his iPad.

You've made a great start to your new challenge. Keep up the good work!

I've read and enjoyed a couple of short stories by Elizabeth Hand but they were included in anthologies so not the same as reading a bunch all together. I do want to read more of her work though.

Wolfy, a couple of the stories were worth every penny. About 3 or 4, not so much. I liked those enough to keep the book. Wolfy, if you ever get a chance to read Errantry, I'd love to know what you think.

@78 Thanks again Ava! He's enjoying it so far! I'm sure I'll hear more about it after Christmas break.

Doing all right with the "books read" but the "books off the shelf" is already stinking along. Book #8 - Folklore Category - is only Book #2 for off the shelf, and it is far from really off the shelf since it is published in one book with three other books.

#8 is The Prince of Annwn from The Mabinogion Tetralogy Interested take on Pagan politics. I've read at least excerpts from the actual Mabinogion before - Welsh folklore that includes at least some of the King Arthur tales. The first part of the book seemed very familiar because it took the plot right from one of the tales in the Mabinogian - A prince has to go to the underworld to kill someone on behalf of the King of the underworld, but while he is there things he hadn't bargained for happen. The first part of this short book reads a bit like a Pagan Pilgrim's Progress. The second part is much more like a traditional faerie romance. 4 star read, and about as close to High Fantasy as I like to get.

Hi Katie, somehow I'd missed your thread so just getting caught up. Looks like a good start to your challenge.

Hi Katie, a quick pass through to wish you a Merry Christmas, my computer time is going to be limited over the next couple of weeks, but I am counting the days to kicking off my 2013 Challenge!

Hi Kiwi & Delta!!! Merry Xmas to you too!

I'm just catching up with your thread too! Looks like you're off to a good start with your 2013 challenge. About your comment in #81, I also have problems with "books off the shelf". I had a "dust collectors" category for 2012 and it was one of the last to be filled.

LOL - & they are dust collectors too!!!

Oh, you just need more of them -- and then you will have an easy time finding titles to read to fill the "books off the shelf" category. That's my strategy and I'm sticking to it.

Book 9 is The Heart Knows Something Different. It is a collection of pieces written by New York kids in the foster system. The pieces are short, very quick to read and would work for a read aloud in a class. Subjects range from how/why they ended up in foster care, the importance of family, relationships, peer pressure and stereotypes, addiction and abuse. Some of the stories are pretty raw. I gave the collection 5 1/2 stars, not because it is a literary masterpiece, but because it is a very honest, well edited collection that gives voice to a group of people who are often marginalized. The experiences the writers talk about are often universal, even though growing up in a group home is certainly not a universal experience. Making friends out of a group of strangers and finding safety when you feel out of control and out of your element are universal though - and they are certainly a part of living in a group home.

My main complaint about the book is it is dated, 1980s and 1990s. The experiences aren't dated but the technology is - no cell phones, walkmans instead of ipods etc. I think kids would connect with it a little better if they thought the dates were 2010 instead of 10 or 15 years back. There are some pieces that are pretty raw that I would be cautious giving to someone under the age of 15, but some of the pieces would work well for younger teens.

The Heart Knows Something Different sounds like an interesting collection, Katie. I agree with you, the dated technology won't be of any interest to a teenage audience, unless they are already interested in that sort of thing.

Lori, They don't spend a lot of time on the technology. I'm just afraid that to a teen it's a red flag that these stories aren't current. Therefore they aren't from their "peers." There is a reference to Tupac though, and Tupac is still big. :)

#10 The She - I was stuck waiting in the Dr's office for over an hour today so I got to finish this book. The She was originally supposed to be in my Young Adult fantasy section but the "She" were not the Sidhe. "She" did refer to a monster, but the monster wasn't enough a part of the book to make it fantasy. If anything, the book was a mystery. If you've read Carol Plum-Ucci's award wining (and deservedly so) The Body of Christopher Creed, you can imagine what I was in for.

In The She Even, was young when his parents died in a boating accident - and I mean a freighter, not a little boat - and now that he's 17, he finds he hasn't coped with it and his ever-so-logical brother is telling him a version of the events he can't stomach. And then of course, there's this popular girl...

The She is a decent book, but compared to The Body of Christopher Creed it's a let down. It travels some of the same themes as Christopher, but the characters are not as engaging or likable.

#11 in Classics. Pooperscooper - I can't believe I read the whole thing. I so should have Pearl Ruled this one. Vathek was one of those novels tucked into one of those 99 cent all-you-can-read ebooks filled with writing that has fallen out of copyright.

Imagine a Heironymous Bosch painting with Caliphs and harem girls instead of his usual tortured Christians. Imagine this painting is a cautionary tale about how the debauched Caliph follows the riches all the way to Castle Eblis (the devil). Yup, you've got Vathek - but Vathek isn't a painting, and it wasn't written by Bosch. It doesn't have the Bosch spark of genius that makes us wanted to look at the tortured freaks being tortured freakishly.

Ugh! Sounds like you've muscled through a couple of not-so-good books. Hope your next books will be better.

Sure did! & not sure why - Vathek felt like housecleaning! But it didn't leave me with a clean house. So what's the point of that?

The book I'm reading now is much better! The Red Heart of Memories and it's sort of a sequel to a book I read years and years ago so it's like returning to old friends.

#12 in a month??? I'm not sure if I can keep up this pace, and yes there were YA books and short books in here, but 12? On top of 2nd job and a sinus infection that knocked me on my keister?

#12 is The Red Heart of Memories which I'm putting in my adult sf&f section. The prequel A Stir of Bones is definitely YA. I read A Stir of Bones years ago in preparation to going to WisCon where I knew Nina would be. It is a bitter sweet book about Susan, a girl whose father abuses her, who finds her only friends and her only safe place in a haunted house.

The Red Heart of Memories picks up when all her friends, except the ghost who doesn't age, have become adults. Both she and Edmund have deadened themselves in order to deal with the past, and there is one night, the night they dealt with her father, which neither of them can remember fully. The Red Heart of Memories is a road trip book, with plenty of goofy magic, that reunites the past with the present while they seek either forgiveness or catharsis, forgiveness being a difficult thing in a case like this.

I absolutely loved The Red Heart of Memories which Nina wrote before A Stir of Bones. That said though, I'm not sure I would've loved it so much if I was meeting Nathan and House and certainly Susan for the first time. Adult Susan is far less likable than the young Susan and it's knowing what she once was that gave me faith as a reader to accept her adult self, knowing that she would still grow and change.

Here you are. Boy, there are a lot of threads in the group this year!
So glad you enjoyed Gone Girl - I loved it too!

Tons of threads!!! I've only found a few so far. Totally loved Gone Girl!

I'm going to have to try Gone girl There've been such interesting reactions to it. Most LT readers have liked it, but a few have violently hated it. I'll have to see for myself.

Bjace - You'll enjoy it, even if just to figure out what all the stir is about. I can see why people have hated it - I think it all depends on how you connect with the characters. They certainly aren't likable. The pearl rule applies. If you're someone who won't like it, you will know within 50 pages. It isn't a sleeper novel or a novel that changes its spots halfway through. - Or I may be wrong. Some of the people who violently hated it may have become invested in some of the characters and they need/want there novels to end a certain way. The negative reviews I've read though said the reader didn't care about the characters and didn't find the events credible. If that's you, you'll know in 50 pages.

Speaking of threads, I put links to my main threads on my profile page in the bio section. Not much of a bio, but I've got links!!! If others would do that too, I'd absolutely love it because it makes people so much more easy to find!

>100 cammykitty: That's not a bad idea. Although most things will be repeated throughout the various threads with just one of them having some more detail in my comments upon finishing books, so I don't know that anyone would really want to follow all of them... lol.

>100 cammykitty:: That's a good idea. Will do that once I set up my 2013 thread!

I'm diggin' your categories this year. I especially like the Spanish-related categories. Do you speak Spanish well?

Yeah @101 &102 I already found you Monkey, but was hoping to find you Mathgirl. I'm looking forward to your threads.

@103 owl - Hablo Espanol un poquito, no hablo muy bien. I took 2 years in college and now work in a school that is at least 25% latino, mostly from Mexico with a large contingent from El Salvador, & 1 teacher from Barcelona, 1 from Honduras, 1 from Chile and 1 from Columbia. So my swear words are up to date because I hear them from the students and check them with the teachers. My reading is slow, but the comprehension is high (yes, I tested it.) Listening, not bad, speaking awful!!!

Y usted? Habla Espanol? I'm really looking forward to the books from Mexico, but I'm impatient to get on to Central and South America as well but those each deserve categories/years of their own.

HI! Just migrated over here for real, and am now in the slow process of finding and reading all my friends' threads. Tis the starring season, you know! Will be looking forward to your tiptree and Mexican categories especially. And will enjoy seeing you delve into the world of GN. (Bone) does pick up, by the way. But never becomes really good, IMO. Too much Carl Barks-love going on).

Just topping by to star your thread. My, you're making good progress already!

@ 104 -- I also speak a little Spanish, though not very well. I've forgotten a lot of what I learned. Surprisingly though, I can read Spanish fairly well.

I've always meant to study Spanish again. I'm interested in languages, and I've always thought Spanish was beautiful.

Spanish is the loving tongue
Bright as music, soft as rain.

Argh!!! Dealing with downloading (on dial-up) from library onto "dumb" version of nook. Went to a nook class and the salesperson even said the "simple touch" wasn't "simple" ie couldn't do what other nooks could. So, 1st I found out that everything I wanted to download was already checked out from the library. Finally I found something that would do as a test. Now it's telling me "user not activated" every time I try to open the book - and on top of all that, the nook is too simple to have a "delete these files" button on it.

Paper!!! I want paper books!!! But The Devil in the White City isn't at the library in paper either right now.

Oh, hi everyone!!!

Yes, Spanish is very beautiful. Una lengua muy linda. - I have a theory about reading. I think the skills for reading are the same in every language, context clues, inferences etc - so if you're a good reader in one language, reading will come easily in another language. - within reason of course!!! Spanish will get ya with those subjects tucked into the verbs!

Totally looking forward to everyone's challenge threads!

How interesting - I've been on the Wait list since April for the audio of The Devil in the White City (only one copy) and am now 57 out of 111. As for the hard copy, 73 out of 81. ??? This book has been out for years. The library has multiple copies. I knew it was popular, but did anyone know it was this popular??? I may have to check out 1/2-price books tomorrow. On New Years Day, I saw a humongous 1/2-price books truck leaving the store and assumed it was dropping off workout DVDs and diet cookbooks for all the resolutionists out there. Perhaps 1 copy of Devil for me was on the truck?

In the meantime, the library tracked down a copy of Her smoke rose up forever for me. I guess that's what's up next after Sabriel.

@ 109 -- That is a good theory! It's definitely one I'm going to consider once I begin my schooling for a Linguistics career.

@111 Good for you! If you want to go into teaching, brush up that Spanish to fluent and get any licensure around literacy/esl etc and you'll get a job right away.

And how about a little insomnia? Book 13-14 down. Good thing is it finally brings me to the goal of 1/2 from the shelves - which I'm going to blow out of whack again with the next few books.

Book 13-14 was Sabriel from the YA fantasy category. Usually I'm not much for High Fantasy (royalty & royal wizards etc), but this one is quite dark and quite well done. 4 1/2 stars. It hit the tropes - boarding school, dying mentor, return of the lost heir to the throne, etc - but does them in such a unique way that you don't groan. & in the meantime, we've got a kick-a$$ female protagonist, high-cost action, blood magic, tons of ghoulies, lots of things that blow up and a sassy cat that just needs to be flung into the water.

Hopefully I can get some sleep now because the library won't open for another 3 1/2 hours. I'm in between books now, unless I want to resort to Help for your Fearful Dog which won't put me to sleep. It will make me stare at Sage instead as he sleeps.

Hi Katie. Now that you've read Sabriel are you planning to read Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr and Abhorsen as well ? I loved Lirael's story more than Sabriels.

#109 - I just read Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. According to that the skills for reading are different in many languages. The brain processes different alphabets by utilizing different pathways and readers need to learn how to read for that specific alphabet. Languages that use the same alphabet do utilize the same skills. If you stick with the same alphabet there is no need to re-learn how to read when learning a new language.

Learning to read Arabic was hard! I still have to sound out words; I don't have nearly as many sight words as in English. But Spanish and German are much more straightforward. So that hypothesis really resonates with me, as does the idea that comprehension skills above the words-on-the-page translate more easily. I didn't have trouble picking up on mood or theme in the various native language books I've read, even when the words themselves are challenging.

VioletBramble, did that book talk at all about reading fingerspelling? Fingerspelling is really interesting to me because of the interstitial role it plays, visual but (mostly*) sequential. While it is possible to see whole words in fingerspelling the way that Morse code aficionados hear whole words at high speeds, it isn't the same as the way we see whole words when reading texts. I would have to imagine that the way the brain processes that must be similarly different.

* through linguistic assimilation you do get (very quick) clues about what is to come though -- the same way in quick English people say "ast about that" to mean "asked" or the way the "n" in tenth is said differently from the "n" in ten.

/linguistic geek out :)

113, That book sounds really fascinating, I'd love to check it out.

114. I wish I could understand Arabic - it's one of the languages I'd jump on if I hade the time and patience to learn a new language. Such beautiful letters...

Absolutely thrilled to have lingusitic geek outs here!!! I'd call myself an amateur linguistic geek.

@113 Violet - I was wondering if Lireal wasn't a Clayr. It seemed way too feminine a name for "Touchstone" and seeing how Nix named a girl "Sabriel" one letter off from "Gabriel" I wasn't going to make any guesses on genders of protagonists! I own Lireal. It's somewhere. I haven't picked up Abhorsen yet. I'll read them all, but that'll probably be over a period of years. I don't usually read series, and the nice thing about that series is Nix obviously took care to make them work as stand-alones as well.

Proust and the Squid goes on the WL. That's fascinating, and it makes sense too. I love looking at languages and trying to figure out what's going on, but when my alphabet changes I shut down. Also, any language with a shared alphabet must share some roots/structure and one with a different system, example Chinese, would presumably have a completely different structure. I've heard that Chip Delaney has a science fiction novel about a language that changes the brain structure of people who learn it. Interesting hypothesis, and actually possible.

Pam - interesting questions about fingerspelling - and sign language in general - speaking of a completely different structure. Sign language perhaps would be closer to spoken language, but since it's visual it would be processed in a different part of the brain. It's also a different sort of visual than printed language, so again, perhaps a different part of the brain. Hmmmm.... Many questions, no real knowledge though!

I do have a book on Mt TBR for this year that I found out about from someone else in the challenge - perhaps it was you, Pam. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language. It's a university press book about a population somewhere on the east coast of the US where there was congenital deafness, and how the population adapted to this.

& yes, I'm at the library picking up my copy of Her smoke rose up forever. I've just read the "sample" of the nook vs of Devil in the White City and have succumbed to the convenience of hitting the buy button. I'm loving all the intricate details and asides of the book - the trivial information, such as the sister of the architect's wife founded Poetry magazine. I've read that magazine! It still exists, or at least still existed in the 90s when I was actively writing poetry. It was the Creme de la Creme.

And another thing... LOL, had to say that since I'm coming back for a PS on a longish ramble.

The High Fantasy issue. Something about High Fantasy has always bothered me, and I didn't figure out what it was until I was at a conference with a British woman who lives in a country with kings and queens, something I have never experienced. She said that all High Fantasy was based on a execrable premise, that some people are born better than others. We've come a long way from the BCE idea of the ruler as being an aspect of god. Nobody takes the divine right of kings seriously anymore, but in High Fantasy, it is in fact based on that.

Sabriel addresses that issue - people of a caste actually have magical "charters" within their blood - but the people themselves tend to be humble. They don't believe that these charters or their birth actually makes them fit for their stations. They are compelled to study and practice in their field in order to fulfill their roles, and the cost of not fulfilling them is great. For me, that takes the sting out of the unfairness of "royalty" and also takes the subgenre of High Fantasy out of a certain blind storytelling naivete.

@ 116 -- I would same the same for myself. I have been interested in languages ever since I began to watch anime, which was almost 12 years ago. I was interested in the Japanese language so I began to learn it. From there, I moved to Korean. Korean is a beautiful language, and the alphabet is quite easy to learn. It's much simpler than Chinese or Japanese.

Unfortunately, I haven't spent any time brushing up on my language skills lately, so must of what I learned has been forgotten. Don't you just hate it when life gets in the way of things?

I'm a little interested in linguistics as well. My husband did his degree in it and I ended up doing an interesting language and culture paper in linguistics when I did a degree later on in education. He's a native Hebrew speaker and I learnt Hebrew at an ulpan many years ago in Tel Aviv. Hebrew is (probably similar to Arabic) completely different with its use of symbols for vowels and they take those helpful symbols (nikud) away in books and newspapers as you just recognise the words and know what vowels to apply intuitively. Plus the right to left scanning! I loved it, though ended up a much better speaker and listener than reader. I wasn't there long enough to get really fluent.
I've dabbled in Spanish and French enough to know that I have a lot more to learn. And I've forgotten most of what I knew.

I love linguistics too, I'd love to have studied more of it in uni than I did (had to move on and actually get a degree. I might go back to it once life and work and such things settles down a bit.

I envy all the people who can understand muliple languages (especially the ones I'd like to speak myself, of course) as I only speak Swedish and English and a tiny bit of French (though I was pleasantly surprised and very proud of myself when I could understand the general gist and several sentences in Flemish when I was on holiday in Antwerp.)

#114 pammab - I don't think the book mentioned finger spelling. I'm sure I would have remembered if it did. ( my first major in university was teacher of the deaf. Sadly this was when I learned I have no talent for learning languages beyond English) I would imagine the parts of the brain utilized would be similar to those utilized by people who read a kanji alphabet. Different visually stimulated parts of the brain are used when reading kanjis vs letters.

#116 - Katie - Lirael and Abhorsen are not stand-a-lones. They are Lirael's story split into two books. Abhorsen picks up right where Lirael ends. And that's right at the edge of a cliff. (figuratively speaking)

>114 pammab:, 116, 121 I happen to be fluent in Swedish sign language. I studied it full time for two years, as preparation for becoming an interpreter. Then I fell in love with theatre and went in another direction. I'm a tad rusty these day, so my sign isn't quite up to par with my english, but I do get by :)

When it comes to fingerspelling, I think there is a similarity with "seeing" a word, rather than reading it syllable for syllable. Fingerspelling, if the word/name spelled out isn't new to the person you're signing with, is done quickly and "sloppily". With my name (Anders), if i'm spelling quickly, it's more like A-N/R (kind of between those letters, quite similar in Swedish sign) - S, with an emphasis on D in articulation. It's decoded, I think, as a shape rather than stand out letters.

With sign in general, I think that both the "spoken" (so to speak) quality and it's three dimensionality makes it different from both talking and written language. In Swedish sign language there are eight components that all carry meaning (hand movements, articulation, mimics, eyebrows, eye contact or no, head stance, body angle), and a full understanding isn't possible without all of them. I assume it's the same with ASL and other sign languages. So, just looking at the hands, sign language is almost impossible to decode. In fact, the first thing you learn in sign school is to look at the face, not the hands.

I think a good place to learn more about the "which part of the brain" bit is Oliver Sacks' Seeing voices. It also has an interesting chapter on Martha's Vineyard.

>117 cammykitty: For me, I think it's the usually heavy presence of tired tropes that makes me wary of High Fantasy, but you make a very interesting point. In fact, thinking about it, the kind of High Fantasy I do like (like Guy Gavriel Kay, even if I'm not quite sure he qualifies) tends to take an active and critical eye to that aspect.

122. You're fluent in Swedish sign? How interesting! I can do a bit of signing as I worked on-and-off with a near-deaf kid and his assistant/interpreter. It's really interesting (and not very difficult to learn the basics, as SSL is often very obvious in its signs).

@123 I still haven't read Guy Gavriel Kay. Must give hime a try some time. I'll bet I know why I haven't yet. Tigana has been on the WL for some time - it clocks in at 816 pages!!! Nook time!!! That book could break my arm.

What an interesting discussion! Anders, very interesting that sign becomes pattern recognition just like printed reading does.

I just thought of this. I've worked with a couple different teachers who were teaching introductory Spanish and they paired sign language with the Spanish words - especially the spoken alphabet. If you've every tried to help a Spanish speaker spell an English word, once you get to the vowels, you'll know why the teachers start using signs. E is A and Y and I is E... But they use signs for other things as well. The teacher I'm working with now even pairs signs with basic English stuff he wants them to remember, like basic classroom rules. & there's a reading intervention course called "Language!" which uses various repetitive hand gestures while learning new words or while learning how to break down words into syllables etc. The claim is that the motions help get the words into the brain. & I won't argue with the test scores I've seen for our"Language!" point person. Her kids all went up at least 2 grade levels in a school year, compared with the minimal growth her students had before she started using that particular program. We're talking 8th graders that started the school year at the 2nd grade reading level and ended it at 4th or 5th grade. That's the difference between a barely functional reader to a reader who can actually enjoy a simple book.

You've never read any Guy Gavriel Kay? Is there room in your challenge this year?

124. That's absolutely fantastic! What a wonderful way to use sign!
And I know about the difficulty in learning English vowels (I personally didn't have a problem with it but I know people who really struggled, and some still do). I in Swedish is pronounced like E in English and I in English is pronounced like the word "Aj" ("ouch!") in Swedish. Somewhat confusing...

>120 PawsforThought: Paws, Dutch and Swedish share Germanic roots, so there are a bunch of similarities people can pick up on. When we visited Stockholm my husband was always reading every sign/notice posted anywhere trying to see what words he could identify, lol.

This thread has turned into an awesome discussion, lol. I'm somewhat of a linguistics/language nerd also, though unfortunately can't speak any other languages yet (I'm in the midst of learning Dutch, and have begun Russian but it's on hold :( while I try to learn Dutch).

And, Devil in the White City is a great book, enjoy! :)

127. Dutch and Swedish has more in common than just the Germanic roots. My Flemish friend and I describe it as two languages that "are cloesly related to German, with tons of French influences and a huge dollop of English loanwords".

German is similar in tone to the Scandinavian languages, too. I find that Scandinavian novels translated into English often have an odd, stilted feeling, while that is not the case for books translated from Swedish into German.

129. Yes, that is true, but the added layers of influence from French and English make Dutch/Flemish and Swedish interestinly close. German is not a part of that closeness, nor is Norwegian or Danish - at least not that I've notised - as they haven't been as influenced by French as Swedish has.
I haven't (for understandable reasons) read any novels translated from Swedish, Norwegian or Danish into either English or German so can't speak about any difference in fluidity but it's interesting that you find a difference despite, one would assume, different translators.

In English, Scandinavian crime novels (of which there are a bazillion) have a distinctive tone. It goes well with the genre, and is, I think, because of linguistic patterns and cultural differences, which are missing in the German versions, in which the language switch is more natural and culturally, Germany is closer to the Scandinavian countries than the US. I've discussed this with a German I know, now living in California, who noticed the same thing.

131. Interesting. I wonder if there is a difference in the translation in the UK, which is culturally just as close to Scandinavia as Germany is.
Does the distinctive tone extend to novels translated from Finnish too or is it only Scandinavian ones?

Oddly enough, I'm reading a book by a Finnish author right now. I don't know, I'm not far enough in, but it's definitely Scandinavian from a cultural perspective. Is the UK that close culturally to Scandinavia? I found it to be more like Canada and maybe Australia (I've lived in England and Canada, but not Australia and my cultural training stayed firmly in the US-UK-Germany-Japan comparisons, with a bit about South America and Southern Europe.)

133. After having lived in the UK I can't say there's much of a difference at all. Sure, there are some differences, but there are differences between Denmark and Sweden too. I can't speak for the US, Australia or Canada as I've never been to either.
The UK, and especially the northern parts, has had quite a lot of Scandinavian influences - back in the very old days - and there are still traces of that and obviously the other way around too.

How do you mean "from a cultural perspective"? I don't understand what you mean by that. You said the novels translated from Scandinavian languages have a stilted feeling to them, but how is that related?

Maybe it's the way verbs are put together? I can't speak for Scandinavian languages or for how they're translated, but in German, for example, "must" is used routinely as a main verb, which can sometimes make German speakers sound more like they're commanding rather than requesting. Does that make sense? The word choices are just different. It doesn't mean that the person is harsher or less friendly, but the language can make a basic request sound more direct.

Let me use the example of British vs. American books, because we're both familiar with both. Can't you spot that a book is written by an American fairly early on? Not because one is better or even because of the obvious spelling and linguistic tics (in the hospital as opposed to in hospital, for example), but in the feel?

I'm doing a very bad job of explaining, aren't I? In regards to the Finnish crime novel, the characters just behave slightly differently than I would expect American characters to behave. For example, there is a less rigid attitude toward relationships and higher education is presented less as a tool for advancement, than as, well, education. Does that make sense?

Wow. Great discussion!

Yes, Ridgeway. You're making sense to me. I've heard similar comments about Serbian - the way the language is structured makes the person use "I" as in the pronoun a lot, which makes them sound self-centered to someone outside of that language. The "must" in German is kind of funny, because it feeds into the US stereotype of them being very task driven and bossy.

I noticed in The Miniature Wife by Manuel Gonzales, a Mexican-American, that his language often reminded me of Borges in translation. I assumed it was because he had read a lot of Borges in translation and admired it, but now I'm wondering if it isn't partly a factor of being bilingual Spanish & English.

I used to work with translations in a packaging company, and they always told us to leave 3 times the room for the Spanish and French than for the English. The translations were always much more lengthy, so when I started reading side-by-side English to original Spanish, I was shocked to notice the English was always lengthier. Translation side-effect!!! The translators typically felt they had to unpack everything in the Spanish, even that subject tucked into the verbs. (All verbs in Spanish have endings indicating I, you, we, third person etc.) They also tended to go the long way round describing an idiom. - I've also noticed translations from Asian languages tend to have a certain feel, which I had assumed was the choice of the translator to indicate a certain cultural tone. - As for American English speakers, I'm always afraid we seem rude in other languages. Spanish has a "formal" form for you which is commonly used. The American culture bucks a bit against formal. We want our leaders to have come from common stock and be just "plain folks" who are super intelligent. (Okay, I know. Easy pickings for political satire here.) Because of this, I think we tend to get along and understand the Australians probably better than any other country. But when we start speaking in a language like Spanish or French (I think French has this too), we forget (or chaff against) using a formal form that is meant to imply respect, but in the US it also subtly implies that the person is somehow better than you - whereas in the original languages, it's simple courtesy.

@125 Yes, there's room for Guy Gavriel Kay. I built the challenge with the two slushy categories, wishlist and random. & books like Kindred could squish into many places, SF&F, 500 women, random or I think she's even Tiptree. And if I really want to squeeze a book in, I will. A couple years ago I squooshed Life of Pi into the animal behavior category. ;)

Which Gavriel Kay should I go for. Limited number available on nook, and the nook calls me now. (Remember when they said Cabbage Patch dolls were possessed? I think nooks are possessed, because if I'm going to buy a book, it makes more sense to buy a book that won't die when my electronic device gets out-of-date and that can be resold, mooched or shared. But if GK is going to write 800+ page books, I want them electronically.

Tigana was the one on the WL, but it's 800+ and not in nook format. The other one I was considering is The Lions of Al-Rassan. Thoughts?

#15 in the Graphic Novels category Blacksad: A Silent Hell. I meant to wait a bit before hitting another GN, but I browsed this book at B&N while waiting for my nook class (where they told me my nook really was as annoying as I thought). Then I found it while I was at the library. Then once it was at home, it was far more bright and shiny than the other two books - which are also bright and shiny, but they don't have watercolors!!!

Blacksad - what can I say. Best Kitty Noir out there. Charming protag. The shorts in the back were great once you know Blacksad as a character. The subtlety. If you ever read this book, don't forget to look at the art on the inside back cover. I love the Age-of-Aquarius Cat with the mermaid tats. What an angel. ;)

As for translations and category squooshing, Blacksad is from Spain. Both the writer and the illustrator are Spanish, but the book is lovingly (and accurately) set in New Orleans. The library has one of the series in the original Spanish. I have it requested for a couple months from now. Hopefully, my Spanish is good enough and I can put it in my Spanish language category.

If this image works (copyrighted obviously to Juanjo Guarnido, the artist, here is Blacksad in a Mardi Gras crowd. & btw, the art is rich and subtle throughout the entire piece.



& btw, I'm intrigued by the way the artist was able to approach race while not even using humans. Since this is Mardi Gras, the black face is pretty extreme, but you'll see more subtle things throughout the piece which deals somewhat with the history of Jazz, which is all about race.

Those are the two I would suggest. Tigana is my favorite, and possibly a perfect book, but it is long! The Lions of Al-Rassan is more manageable and has a fantastic female character (among other fantastic characters) and is based on Moorish Spain. Of course, if you like Arthurian legend, The Summer Tree is the beginning of a gorgeous trilogy based on that, and A Song for Arbonne has French medieval roots. Not sure you can go wrong with any of his books.

The Lions it is!!!

135-138 . Yes, I do believe I can tell the difference (apart from grammar and spelling) betweena British novel and an American one.
What I was referring to when it comes to Finnish novels was not the difference in behaviour as opposed to American character but difference in translation (as that's what we started out talking about). Since Finnish is so different to the Scandinavian languages but Finland is fairly similar to the Scandinavian countries in terms of culture, I was wondering if you could pick up on the difference in langauge.

I do believe the feeling in a translated novel is very depending on the translator and that person needs to understand the difference in cultures (not saying he or she needs to be an anthropologist but just understand the way this are differently expressed in different languages due to culture). A stilted or strange feeling in a novel is the "fault" of the translator - I believe - more than anything else.

Swedish is like English in that it doesn't (anymore, it was different less than 50 years ago but we move on quickly in this country) have a "polite" form. It's either "you" singular (du) or "you" plural (ni) and that has nothing to do with rank or respect. However, I have never notised any issue with using such forms in other languages where it is common practise. I wonder if people from other English-speaking nations, the UK and Australia in particular since we've mentioned them, have notised this issue with translations.

And sorry, cammykitty, for hijacking your thread.

I am absolutely loving the discussion going on in this thread.

Blacksad is already on my wishlist but if it wasn't before then it would be now.

Paws, do you think that that is a bad thing in the translation, when the characteristics of the original language show through? I like it. The book is usually set in that country and it helps create an atmosphere. I'm annoyed when British books are "Americanized" - Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close is published here as Fleshmarket Alley, for example.

144. I don't think I'd count it so much as characteristics as grammatic rules. You can't directly translate things into another language, you have to many allowances and if there is stiltedness it's because the translation isn't good enough. But that's what I think. As I said at the beginning, I don't read Scandinavian fiction in English.

It's not a matter of Americanizing - which I HATE - but of making the language flow better.

Adding my two cents to the translation discussion: I think a certain kind of core quality a language has can sometimes be difficult to put across. All the scandinavian languages have (at least the possibility of) a sparse harshness to them, that I can imagine gets a different feel to it when translated. Writers like Sara Lidman or Torgny Lindgren, or for that matter Laxness or Loe or the Icelandic Sagas will be very dependent on a translator not just keeping the sparseness, but also the feeling that there is much more brewing underneath.

Of course, that kind of frail core quality exists in all languages. When I read Swedish translations of Japanese for example, it's imagery often strikes me as naive, almost poor. Which is of course a failure on the translator's part, in capturing something.

With English translated to Swedish, I think the biggest danger is that we are so anglified as a country, there often tend to be strange anglicisms left in the text - english syntax or idioms translated literally. But there are also more subtle things. One pet peeve of mine is the, in english speaking literature, frequent shrugging. The Swedish equivalent "rycka på axlarna", is not only longer, but is unconditionally literal. So you end up with people doing exhaggerated shoulder movements on each and every page. Another is "suppose", frequently used in everyday talk in English (more in England than in the US?). The Swedish synonym "antar" however, is rarely used in spoken language, except in translated texts from English, where any eight year old is suddenly using it in her conversations with friends.

There is a Swedish speaking minority in Finland (Tove Jansson being the most internationally known writer), and I think it's easy to spot the difference between Swedish and Finnish Swedish in text, not only due to choice of words - but because there is a certain ambience that is slightly different.

>138 cammykitty: I just read the first Blacksad book, and enjoyed it a lot. Great to see it holds up.

>140 cammykitty: A good choice!

I am loving the discussion here too -- can't believe how much I've missed by being gone a day! :)

Way back at #122, Anders said "In Swedish sign language there are eight components that all carry meaning... I assume it's the same with ASL and other sign languages." I'm really intrigued by the eight components that you list, because they are not exactly the same as the building blocks that we talk about for American Sign Language. I wonder whether the difference is in the structure of the language, whether it is in the academic approach to the language, or whether it is in "what is useful for language pedagogy" vs. "what linguists discuss as sign language phonology". I'm expecting #3, so now I'm off to find a book on a non-American signed language.

146. I think that is all very true.

"Spare harshness" is an excellent way to put the quality that comes through in Scandinavian crime novels. Maybe that's why they are so popular here?

My pet peeve in reading a translated book is when a translator picks an English dialect to approximate a character in a book who speaks in a local dialect. I read one book translated from the French where the main character's assistant spoke with a cockney accent. Yes, it communicated that the person was from a different background, but having a very French character speak like Fagin in a bad Christmas play was jarring. I wish they would give a taste of the local dialect instead, or skip it altogether.

>148 pammab: Looking back on my post, I realise I only listed seven components. The eighth being hand forms, of course. Your question is interesting! We had a few teachers with academic background in sign languge (all of them were deaf as well), but I can't know if they "dumbed it down" for us to make sense in a practical environment (after all, aiming at being preparation for interpreter school, what I went to was kind of like an überintense conversation class for two years, rather than linguistics). That being said though, I think there are definite differences in the different sign languages in which components they emphasise. I've encountered many deaf of other countries where articulation or eyebrows play a smaller part than in Swedish sign, for instance. (In Swedish sign language, eyebrows are essentially the difference between a statement and a question).

>150 RidgewayGirl: Oh, I dislike that too. In the classic translation of Lysistrate, the translator has the Spartans speaking Finnish Swedish. It makes absolutely no sense, and I've never seen it work on stage.

@141 Paws, no apologies for hijacking my thread! I'm enjoying this discussion.

The length issue I mentioned IMHO is an artifact of translation, and probably also a sign of not the best translator. The sound of the language though, isn't necessarily the sign of a bad translator. Borges has had some excellent translators and so has Neruda, and there seems to be a quality that is similar to both. In Neruda's case, I'm always frustrated with the translation because I've got the original poem right next to it and can see where the translator had to make a choice, but that said the translations usually have a light, transparent feel which I can tell is also in the original. However, I wouldn't say the same for the translation of In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez that I read. Perhaps what we are talking about may be translators influencing translators just as much as it is a quality coming through from the original language.

@146 Anders, OMG shrugging!!! I write and am in a writer's group, and we're constantly reminding each other not to overuse stupid, useless gestures such as shrugging. American authors have their characters shrugging all the time!!! I can see that as a translator's nightmare. We "suppose" quite a bit in writing in the US, but you don't hear it often in speech - more from older people, I suppose. ;) We're more likely to say "I guess" or just shrug.

@150-1 Ridgeway, that's a huge pet peeve!!! I don't even like it when it's an English dialect in English, unless it's super well done. It usually comes off as awkward and condescending. & yes I know every language has accents that are sexier than others or more hick than others, but isn't there a better way of showing your speaker is from Cuba or Puerto Rico than giving them a cockney or deep south US accent? For example, a Puerto Rican would have several nearly English words in their vocabulary - couldn't the author have the Puerto Rican speaker sometimes use words from another language smacked right into the middle of a sentence in the main language. For a Cuban character, say shortly after the revolution, picking vocabulary like "comrade" once in awhile would get the point across. You wouldn't have to drop a few letters here and there to say "See, I know Cubans drop the s!" Dialect is a short cut to characterization, and of course it doesn't translate well. Unintentional comedic effect! Finnish Swedish Spartans indeed!

Anders, I think you're the one who turned me onto Blacksad. (Wolfy, you'll love it!) I can tell it's one of those series that gets better the more you read of it. Speaking of characterization!!! I'm already counting Blacksad's nine lives, because I know he's lost at least two just from reading one installment. Poor guy! He needs more than nine lives. He can burn through them pretty quickly.

As for The Lions of Al-Rassan I downloaded a sample today, but haven't bought it yet. There are at least 4 books that are in line before it. I used my in-store reading time on The Nimrod Flipout. He's a bit crude (and definitely crazy), but made me smile. I was starting to get restless on the title story, but when I got to the end there was certainly a worthwhile payoff.

151. Oh, jeez, really? Did the translator have then pronounce "sh" like "s" and everything? That must be hilarious!

152. RidgewayGirl used the phrase "an odd, stilted feeling" which I interpreted as something negative (though that could of coure be a mistake on my part) and genereally speaking, we do try to minimize negative things in translations, don't we? That's why I said I think it's the fault of the translator. Getting the feeling of how a language sounds is not a bad thing, but it is also - in my opinion - not the same thing.

I dislike most dialects in literature too. There are some people who can do it well - they do it with love and respect for the character rather than as a way to stereotype them. I have to say the Harry Potter series is one of my favourite examples of this - the translator there has acctually done a good job of translating the dialects without being annoyingly typical (though I can't say the same for the Swedish audiobooks, le sigh.)
I do however love poetry and prose written in dialect when it's the author's own dialect. There are a few writers up here in the north who have done that and I love it. It's quite a rare thing to see your own dialect, or a close relative of it, in writing so to me it's a real treat. Especially since many dialects seem to be waning away in favour of "Standard Swedish".

Oh, I can see that that would come across as a negative thing. I didn't mean it that way at all! Anders put it much better than I did. I did just come across Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher on my wishlist and I'm going to order a copy.

154. That looks like a very interesting book. I need to check it out and see if it might be worth investing in. I love linguistics and I miss studying it in school (I've never had a better time - study-wise - than when I studied that).

>154 RidgewayGirl:: Through the Language Glass was up for the Royal Society's Winton Prize for Science Books a couple of years ago, and you can download the first chapter here (it takes a while):
http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/awards/medals-awards...
I read it a while ago and found it quite interesting. Thanks for the reminder!

And at the risk of inflicting a shower of book bullets on this thread, here's a link to the main prize page:
http://royalsociety.org/awards/science-books/

Oh my! Book bullets!!! Duck! Through the Language Glass is definitely going on my WL too, especially if it's got a science prize.

157. A science prize from the Royal Society, no less. I love the Royal Society. So, so very great.

Just ordered Deutscher's book from my library! I think something hit me...

Sorry. But put the blame on rabbitprincess for making it sound extra attractive!

Don't let the length of Tigana put you off. It is long, but the pacing is good and I didn't find it difficult to get through the book. I've read several of GGK's books and I've loved every one but perhaps Tigana is my favourite. It's really worth reading.

>159 hailelib:, 160: If it makes you feel better I sustained a self-inflicted book bullet too :)

Putting Blacksad on the wishlist!

I'm reading every other story in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr because it's one of those best of a person's lifetime of work collections. 500+ pages long. I'll save the other half of it for later this year or another year. For those of you who don't know about Tiptree, was one of the Golden Age Science Fiction writers. She hid her identity for quite a long time, but eventually was outed. When she was outed, she quit writing, I think only for several years - not the rest of her life.

In college, especially during my poetry coursework, I seemed to always be reading an essay or someone else's paper about "seminal writing." It wasn't always clear what "seminal writing" was, other than something that was straight-forward, powerful and linked back to basic human needs and desires. And yes, it was always used to describe the writing of a man, so on some level the phrase began to mean powerful writing by a male.

Just finished reading Tiptree's novela "A Momentary Taste of Being" and can now say I truly know what seminal writing is.

I have James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon - it's in my massive TBR pile, I never had a TBR pile that was bigger than ten books before LT! You can always 'hit' my collection for category 16 - as long as it is borrowed and not stolen! :-)

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Ooh, a novella. I didn't realize it was a novella.... Now my appetite is even further whetted!

LOL, Di - I probably will hit your collection for category 16!!! & I'm totally planning on reading James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon but wanted to read some of her writing first. After reading the bio, I want to go back and read the other half of Her smoke rose up forever.

I've only got three stories left in the collection, but I'm almost afraid I hit mental overdrive. The stories were mushing around in my head and making strange dreams. I think I'll read a bit more of Help for your fearful dog and Devil in the White City today and save the stories for later this week.

Pam - most of the pieces in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever are short stories averaging around 20 pages. "A Momentary Taste of Being" is a 90 page novella. Totally worth picking up, and read the "Houston" story too - slow start but thought provoking - reminds me of I am Legend.

Did I mention that I hated Devil in the White City? Totally felt like the author only had parts of two stories, and just stuck them together to make a book.

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

@168 I remember you said that about Devil in the White City. I'm enjoying it, but at times I'm not trusting the writer or I want to know more - like when wife #2 said how sweet a man Mr. Murderer was, was that after he was caught? Her quote sounded more like what the shocked wife would say to a newspaper reporter than what a wife who moved back in with her parents would say. "He was such a sweet man" seems like a wife/girlfriend of murderer/rapist cliche enough that I'm suspicious that comes out of women's mouths because they are in shock and are trying to tell themselves they haven't really been sharing a bed with someone who would do that. After a year or two goes by, I doubt they would say that.

Part that's bothering me about Devil is it doesn't seem that Larson is using any criteria to decide what detail is worthy of print space and what is extraneous.

I have to admit that I never even finished the book and it had come highly recommended to me. I just never could get into it. Nice to know I wasn't the only one.

@170 - You're definitely not the only one. I think Di's feeling, that it was two books cobbled together, was a fairly common one. Also, if you're into tightly focused/edited books, which usually I am, this one ain't it.

I'm still really enjoying it though, and hopefully will get it read fairly quickly (without losing sleep). I know and like Chicago enough to enjoy the trivia an editor who wanted to cut it down to 400 pages would've slashed. Victoria and I are doing a tandem read, and at the moment we're both saying there's too many beautiful blue eyes and a bit of Jack the Ripper TMI.

#16 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever - I read only the odd numbered stories as I mentioned before. On the whole, I loved the collection and found them to be much more about human beings than about space exploration. There's certainly an evolution in the author's thought process about men, and the relationship between women and men. Only 2 of the 9 stories were duds, IMHO. The others were 4-5 stars. The title story had a better title than story. "Slow Music" just bugged me. Once I realized the character's name "Peachthief" was a sly reference to Eve, I perked up and decided to forgive her the all-white talking animals, but alas. I've decided not to forgive her after all.

That said, anyone interested in gender issues (or science vs religion issues) that isn't afraid of obvious phallic symbolism will like this book. She's definitely the right author to honor by using her name on an Science Fiction and Fantasy award that explores gender.

Ooh. Perhaps this is a book that I should sample from slowly over the course of a year? I was right with it until "obvious phallic imagery"... Glad you had such a good read!

@173 Especially earlier on in her writing, it seemed like she hit the "maleness" in her male characters perhaps a bit too hard to make up for that fact that... well, she was missing that personal experience.

Just in general, I think it's a good idea to read collections that cover a lifetime's worth of work spread out over a period of time. I don't know why I haven't been taking my own advice - except for The Weird Compendium. I'm reading that one a story or so a month.

I'm very curious about Tiptree now! Bullet duly taken.

Sorry Anders - I hope you're at least bleeding a vibrant alien shade of green from the bullet. ;)

>176 cammykitty: Are there any other colors blood could be?

I know and like Chicago enough to enjoy the trivia an editor who wanted to cut it down to 400 pages would've slashed.

LOL! Agreed. I don't know Chicago so well, but enjoyed that trivia anyway.

#17 Devil in the White City I'm going to put it under history, but it could certainly go under crime or Wishlist. At the beginning of this year, it was the book that had languished longest on the wishlist. Now the honor goes to The Book Thief.

I really enjoyed Devil - fast read - yes, over 400 pages, but I'm going to count it as 1 book because my numbers are fine right now and it's barely over 400 - and I've got enough books planned for its possible categories that I want to save the spots.

Even though I was interested in all the minutia of both stories, I have to agree with Di. It would've been stronger as two separate books - 1 focusing on the world fair, perhaps with more about Mrs. Palmer and the women's building, or the labor issues involved - the unions won a major victory during the building of the fair. Or if we want to go with the true crime angle, more on Prendergrast, but then we should've seen more about the mayor too.

The second book would've been about our serial killer - and for more information, the changing role of women in society, the medical community and its need for bodies, and a look at what the Chicago police actually were doing. The fact that the police chief had been Holmes' lawyer at one point was barely mentioned. I know there's probably limited information on some of this, but certainly we could look more closely at what the police were doing day to day. The role of women is key to Holmes' crimes too. Women were just leaving home and entering the work force in a way they hadn't before in history. They were used to having brothers, fathers, cousins, look out for them and probably were on some level unaware of all these men did for them. Modern women are usually raised to watch out for themselves. Back then? It was probably considered indelicate to tell them "if a man treats you this way, they may be thinking of doing ..." Larson himself in Devil mentioned that a bank felt it necessary to run a classified ad among the employment classifieds telling women not to apply to postings that asked for qualities such as young, blond or pretty.

In other words, I thought Devil in the White City was an interesting read, a really good book, but Larson was sitting on top of two really great books.

You make some excellent points about Devil in the White City. I listened to the audio version last year and thought it was good but not great.

Devil in the White City is still on my TBR list. I'll eventually get to it. I've just got so many I want to read!

Excellent review, I agree with you about the combination of two strands. Didn't wholly work and there wasn't that much behind the serial killer part but far too much seemed hidden about the World Fair. I did look at why there didn't seem to be much on Holmes and its shocking how little was known.

cbl - I tried to get the audio version last year out of the library, but waited on the wait list long enough that I thought they'd lost the copy!

Thornton, I think you'll enjoy it when you get to it. It's starting to seem like a good candidate for that category people have been joking about "books everyone has read but me." ;)

Speaking of, I'd been planning on reading Emma next. My nook says it's a 1000+ page book. LT says it's about 350 pages. What's going on ? Can I plunge in and start Emma? Should I get a different copy of Emma? I have a book on the Mexico City Earthquake that the library is moving from the Central library to the Southdale library for me so I don't have to deal with downtown parking. ;) I want to be ready to start it when it shows up late next week, so now is not the time to start a chunkster.

The Oxford World's Classics edition of Emma in our library is 445 p. I can't tell how small the print is, whether the next chapter starts on the same page that the previous chapter ends, etc., without physically pulling the book from the shelves.

Aren't nook pages a lot smaller than paper pages? That's been the case with my kindle (although they measure books in % read).

I appreciated reading your thorough review of Devil in the White City. I've got it on my bookshelf and am looking forward to reading it.

I have been enjoying the reviews that have been popping up here for Devil in the White City, including your great review Katie! Some good information to keep in mind when I get around to reading it.

As for the page count for your e-book copy of Emma, I agree with Kay's suggestion that the nook pages are smaller than paper pages - contain less text - and the pagination for the Nook e-book increases the page count for the book. The e-book copy of Pride and Prejudice that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg that I am currently reading on my iPod Touch says the book is 1025 pages in length. I know the paper copy of P&P is not that big! ;-)

Page counts for e-books are weird, so I never use them when I'm keeping track of how many pages I've read. Like right now I'm reading The Fault in Our Stars on my NOOK, and the page count is only 190 pages but I know the book isn't that small in paperback.

You do make excellent points about Devil - it was interesting reading it with you and seeing what thoughts struck both of us.

I'm going to a 3 day book gathering this next week and one night we come to the event dressed as characters from a book. The theme is Belle Epoch. My friends and I (4 of us from a bookclub) know that many (about 350 attend) will come in beautiful clothes of that era but we like to do more creative "dressing". We are each making a costume of the devil... in the white city. We each have a devil's mask and a lovely Belle Epoch hat and .....20 yards of white cheesecloth to assemble around us in some way. I can't wait to see what the others have come up with! I will wear a long black shirt and boots and a stand away cape (love that starch!) with a hood. My hat will be worn over the hood and is a confection in lavendar net and gray feathers. So striking against my sinister red devil's face!

@189 Victoria, it's been a great tandem read!!! I'm looking forward to your final thoughts. I went to my brother's house and saw a few friends there. One grew up in Chicago, and when I showed her the picture of the statue with the (spoiler, but you know what I mean - in the end) around it, she got very excited. She knew it. It's still in Jackson park, and she remembers being a kid, seeing it for the first time. She said it was huge and all gold and she just stared up at it as long as she could. Another friend is really into architecture and wanted to read it, but wasn't interested in the crime aspect. The way the book is set up, it's pretty easy to skip the chapters on Holmes, so she's planning on doing that... but she knows all about homes anyway. Apparently there's a ghost tv show that visited his hotel. Of course, it would be/would be said to be haunted!

Thanks for the info on ebook pages. How strange! I had a friend look at my copy of Emma, and apparently it's just like her tiny type 357 page version. So I guess I'll count it as a 400 page book and won't pay any attention to ebook counts anymore - which is kind of inconvenient. I like knowing what kind of time commitment I'm looking at! She's telling me I should read Persuasion next instead though because she likes it better. Emma is the one that fits my 500 books by Women Writers category though. I read the review in 500 books today and can tell that what they like about it is what my friend didn't like. Apparently Emma has a rather strong personality.

The library is showing my Earthquake book as "in transit" so perhaps its time to fill in with some of the longer short stories from the Weird: Compendium ... and the dog book I'm avoiding.

That's odd - and it must not be all books because I just opened a book from my nook, and page 20 went for 5 pages as I thumbed through. I thought I had noticed that before and I think it depends on what size type you have the book set at. That said, I noticed that when I wanted to buy Les Miserables, different books showed different page counts. I'm wondering if that has to do with the size type that the edition is actually printed in.

@192 I can change the type size on my nook, and it doesn't change the page count. I think it has to do with the size of type they used in the original e-book file, or the size in the print edition they based the e-book on. My e-book of Devil in the White City was paginated exactly the same way the print edition does. & I'm sure different e-readers and formats do different things with page numbers. Makes me scratch my head!

@190 Clue, how funny!!! & I'm sure plenty of the fair goers thought they saw the devil there! I'm sure the Zulus and Dhomaney's who dressed for warm climates shocked them. Which was another thing I thought about in Devil. Chicago is hot in the summer, but the fair ran in months that would've been far too cold for some of the traditional clothing of the people in the exhibits.

Thank you for stopping by my thread. I am hopelessly behind but will catch up on everyone's threads and reviews soon!

@194 Good to see ya luv. It's impossible not to get behind on everyone's threads!!!

#18 Black Irish in the mysteries section. Police procedural I received for an ER book. And what are with these touchstones? this is pulling up The Hobbit??? I had another ER book that was pulling up the Canterbury Tales.

Anyway, I'm really annoyed with Black Irish. It started out really promising. Sensible yet interesting female protagonist returns to police department of her tightly knit and closed mouth Irish-American community where there are some murders going on that seem to have their roots in IRA activity going back into the 70s and 80s. The community was really well done. In the beginning, the characterization seemed well done. Then the author started making continuity errors. He started saying things like the protag (named Absolam! Yuck! Especially for a female - an Irish one at that) okay, I was saying he would say Abbi was too busy to go to her historical researcher to see his findings that pertained to her case... but four pages later she's doing an hour workout in the gym??? There's a cheesy sex scene that seemed to be there for the plot, not because it seemed like the characters had gotten to that point. And she gets in a car and starts the engine - even though there's a sign from the killer and an arrow pointing to the steering wheel on the windshield. Come on - this is a woman who knows about the IRA and the "troubles." They were notorious for car bombs. Who the h.e.double hockey sticks would've gotten into that car without calling a bomb squad first. That, and she was breaking plenty of police procedures and in the end suffered no consequences, but not because anyone was covering up for her. Huh?

So, now I gotta go right a review for this. Can't decide between 2 1/2 stars or 3. If I'd been able to turn off my critical brain, I would've enjoyed it but there were too many flaws for me to overlook, especially of the protag doing dumb things just to move the plot along variety.

Sorry to hear it didn't work for you.... (But very entertaining comments!) It is too bad when ER books are a miss.

Did not read that review once I saw the title as it is also my ER book. La, la, la...

Ouch, too bad that one didn't work out. But I agree with pammab, loved reading your comments about it!

@198 I do that too Ridgeway. We can compare notes after you've finished it. Does that mean you've got books like Bobby Sands' prison diaries in your stacks too?

Pam & Rabbit - thanks! Bad reviews are always so much more amusing than raves. & this was a throw against the wall book for me. Not because it was so much more terrible than other books. It was because it was such a waste of potential!

No, just an awful lot of Irish crime novels and Brendan Behan. I am hoping I will violently disagree with you!

Ridgeway, I'm hoping you violently disagree with me too, but I doubt you will. I envy your collection of Irish crime novels.

Oh no, I read the first few words in your review for Black Irish. :( It's my ER-book too, so I'll come back and read the rest once I'm done. *Lowering my expectations, hoping to "violently disagree" with you as well.* :)

Eva, I do hope you like it. I've been the only person to hate a particular ER book before.

Blush. I just added another category. #18 books to feed the writer's brain. I'm reading Letters to a young novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa and it's abstract but wonderful. I own tons of books on writing and literary criticism, and I also writer for fun and want to get more writing done. This category is pretty broad. Of course it's for books on writing and literary criticism, but it's also for books recommended by writers or for books for inspiration or research on whatever I may be working on. I've also lowered my challenge goal from 85 to 80 because I don't want the challenge to take precedence over writing time.

That's another book for me to look out! Especially if it is a bit abstract. I've read a few of his novels, but never anything like this by him.
What kind of writing do you do? Is it just for you or do you plan to publish?

I think you're the only challenger who is adding categories rather than shoehorning :)

@207 Yes, I'm totally crazy. Totally. But I sort of need that category and I don't know why I didn't do it years ago. I'll stop now though. 20 categories would be too many. Really.

@206 I've got one YA fantasy novel (Celtic Urban) finished and I should be trying to market it, but I absolutely hate and fear doing that so at the moment I'd say I'm just doing it for fun. The new work-in-progress wants to be a alternate world "realistic" fantasy and I think it wants to be a novel.

I've got all but 2 sections of the Vargas Llosa book read, and the section on "Chinese Boxes" explains a lot about his personal style without of course mentioning his own writing at all. He talks about deliberately leaving information out that the author intends the reader to figure out on their own. Ha! Who Killed Palomino Molero is all about what isn't stated.

#205 - Blush. I just added another category. #18 books to feed the writer's brain.

#207 - I think you're the only challenger who is adding categories rather than shoehorning :)

LOL.... love it!

:) Thanks Lori I'll use them all too! I promise. I feel kind of like I'm in the candy shop and have been asked to choose between the chocolate covered caramels and the truffles. Both please!!!

Well, it is a Category challenge after all - nice to have someone take full advantage of that. LOL!

->196 cammykitty:
Oh dear, I liked Black Irish even less than you did. What a mess that was!

@212 I'm so glad!!! Not that you read a bad book, but that I'm not the lone reviewer that hated it. Talk about publishing a manuscript that isn't ready.

Ugh. I'm reading it now (about halfway) and while it has some huge problems, it isn't terrible. So either it goes downhill soon or I'll be the one who minded it the least. But this guy should not have chosen a female protagonist. Or he should have at least talked to a woman before writing this character. And, yeah, I'm hoping that this has not been edited at all yet, although the formatting and polish of the ARC says differently.

It has a release date of February 26th, so I fear most of it will stay as is. I'm interested to see what you think of the denouement.

@215 that was a denouement??? I thought it was a section from some other potboiler stuck onto the end. I could smell the mold off the pulp it came from. For reals??? And as you said, what had he done to prepare us for that kind of ending? Nothing much. We knew of the existence of that character and we knew the one person she didn't want to have a tarnished memory of was holding something back. That's all the prep work that was done for the ending. You can't have a contorted ending like that without giving the reader far more to go on! And did he actually expect us to take that multiple personality thing seriously? Said character was certainly stupid enough to have a serious mental illness, but he didn't flesh out any of the characters enough to make a case for mental illness.

I noticed LT is still saying "no rating" for Black Irish officially. Is that out of deference to the publisher's request to save reviews until the release date? I'm thinking it's going to average between a two and a three.

#19 kicked butt over poor little Black Irish but I don't think "kicked butt" is a reverent enough way to speak of Nothing, Nobody by Elena Poniatowksa. Nothing, Nobody is an account of the people's experiences after the devastating earthquakes that leveled parts of Mexico City in 1985. Of course it hit the poor harder, and like Haiti, many of the buildings that came down did so because of poor construction. When the legislatures came together and proposed new building codes, they realized that all the proper codes were already on the books. Due to corruption, they hadn't been followed.

There is a lot of anger towards the government in the book. Poniatowska clearly has a bias, but IMHO, I think the anger is justified. There is also a lot of strength, and unimaginable experiences told in this book. One rescue volunteer was chosen because he was small to crawl back in forth through a tunnel in the ruins of the collapsed hospital where they had a group of 36 survivors trapped, covered with rubble past their hands except for one doctor whose hands were free - "planted in the dirt like little pine trees." The volunteer brought oxygen to them and water and made the trip as many times as he could until people began worrying that he was going to endanger himself by becoming too tired. Eventually they were able to widen the tunnel and begin getting the people out, but 33 of them suffocated before they could finish. I'm not going to forget about that soon. Of course, tragedy is at the core of the book. However, the ultimate message is about how some people sacrifice themselves for the good of others and are able to accomplish what a room full of egos never could.

My official review is more detailed, and if you're interested it is here: http://www.librarything.com/work/book/92872378

->216 cammykitty:
Well, what am I to call it? Perhaps "random, out-of-the-blue, oops my published said I couldn't go over 321 pages" ending. :)

"I'm thinking it's going to average between a two and a three"
There are a few 4+ ratings in there (although most hover around 3), so you never know...

So what happened to this book? It really went nuts there. And in what world would her behavior get her a commendation rather than a termination from the police department? Lucky Z taped a bunch of extra bullets under the table since she had to shoot a bunch of bullets around randomly before her first big finale. And did you notice that after the booty call, in which he took off her top by ripping all the buttons off, she went straight to the hospital and then straight to the station? Yipes!

I'm sorry you all didn't like your book, but I'm sure enjoying your conversation about it!

@219 !!! Yes, and all without a change of clothes! I used to read slush pile for a small press and they sent me one manuscript written from a male point of view, and every time there was a sex scene (which there were far too many of) it always involved biting off buttons. Since then, I've always snickered whenever buttons become a casualty of fictional sex. & what guy thinks the woman isn't going to be angry about her ruined blouse? Yes we know how to sew buttons back on, but we don't ever do it!

& yes, she would've been put on unpaid leave and there would've been a serious investigation... which of course wouldn't go well for her. & also, once it became known that a close relative was an intended victim, she would've been off the case instantly. & while we're at it, why would someone SPOILER who was on the police force and had a rap sheet behind him in another country ever do something to connect himself to someone else's murders. If Talty had pushed Black Irish just a little further, it could've become a police procedural farce.

@220 - It's rare when we can get a snark-fest trio going, isn't it. ;)

I'm with Carrie, loving the snark-fest. What is it with guys and the whole ripping the buttons off! Must make them feel manly or something!

It's that wildman thing - ravishment! & perhaps I'm naive, but IMHO, the button-ripping thing happens 90 times more often in fiction than in real life. I haven't met a known button-ripper yet. Not that I've made a survey.

Can you see that in a Manor House romance? Lady of the house goes off with the footman. "Young man, this dress and its buttons are worth more than your year's wages. Manhandle me, but take care of my clothes as you do so."

The button things extends to movies too. Everytime I see a movie in which two people are about to have sex and one rips open the shirt of the other so that the buttons fly across the room, I squirm in my seat and can't think about anything else than rummaging around the roomtrying to find them all.

Re 208
One already written! And you are writing another! Wow! As for books taking a life of their own, that doesn't surprise me, I used to write short stories at school, and they never ended where I thought they would!

Looks like I'll have to get a hold of the Vargas Llosa Book and reread Palomino again.

Re Buttons - clearly a big difference between men and women! I see/ read those scenes with a little bit of my brain thinking "ooh she's going to be angry about him ruining her top in the morning".

Most of those buttons must not be sewn on very well either, because most of the time the fabric would rip before the button came off.

>223 cammykitty: I've ripped the buttons on my own shirt once, to get out of it after a particularly nasty diaper changing incident. Does that count? (and nope, I never found all of the buttons afterwards)

I think Betty has hit in on the head. Those were definitely the clothes you purchase today. The buttons come off easily anyway. I can't tell you how many I've had to sew back on over the last few years. It's not just the cheap ones either; it's the ones you find at Belk or Macy's.

228. Oh, yesh. It doesn't matter how expensive the clothes are (not that I have a habit of buying very expensive clothes) - the buttons are always coming off almost as soon as you've paid for them.
I've taken to reinforcing the button stitching on jackets/coats and other clothes where there will be a bit of a stress on the buttons as soon as I've brought them home.

Her carelessness at each and every crime scene was also a problem. Could she leave more trace evidence at each scene? For a Harvard grad, she's kind of an idiot. And, yes, her utter ignorance of basic history did not back up her supposed education.

I think this was a not bad second draft of a novel. It required a few critical readers and an editor's input and then another rewrite. Also, making his protagonist female was beyond his skills. It's not a case of just mentioning heels and her "two upturned breasts" (what?) and you're good to go. There's more to it than that! Just like mentioning power tools and swearing a lot doesn't make a credible male character.

I was expecting her to stop the action and ask Billy if he planned to pay for that.

@228 GBM That just makes you practical and brave. I would've ripped my clothes off too after a bad diaper changing accident.

@224 Paws, I was thinking that too but the only one I could remember for sure was The English Patient - and I'm not sure I'm remembering it right. The movies ought to go to the stripper trick of using velcro. ;) They probably already have, but for the guys, ouch, chest hair and velcro don't mix well.

@225 Thanks soffita!

@230 Ridgeway - I agree with the second draft thing. He obviously could've used a good writer's group. & Absolom wasn't really convincing in either gender. The book felt forced, as though he had an outline and a page limit and refused to deviate from it. I kind of feel sorry for Talty. That isn't a novel you want as your fictional debut. I know a writer who published one flawed novel and were never able to get a publisher to look at them again, even though their following books were far better. And it wasn't even that flawed - it was YA and a lot of kids liked it, but it didn't sell well and it did have one big plot hole in it.

231. Not too great for women with long hair either. Speaking as someone who's had her hair stuck in velcro and zippers more times than she'd like to admit - I prefer buttons.

Any chance this was a self-published book? I got one from ER one time and when I checked out the publishing company it had published exactly 1 book. And the others that were coming were all by the same person also. I have to say that I've been finding the remarks about this book almost hilarious, since I don't have to read it.

No, this is being published by Ballantine Books.

He's published other books before too, but this is the first fiction one. & it really is hilarious - and we've held back, trying to avoid spoilers. I explained the book to one of my friends and she said "Okay, his first mistake is in thinking that a woman with an IQ of 80 could ever get hired as a cop." Good one, and she hadn't even read it.

Great discussion about the book Black Irish and buttons. My personal pet peeve of the fashion industry has already been mentioned - that buttons tend to fall of as soon as one starts wearing the garment. The first thing I do now after purchasing new clothes - shirts especially - is I sit down and re-do all of the buttons. My other half used to roll his eyes at the process and told me to not bother until the day he wore a brand new shirt and two buttons came off in his hands while he was putting the shirt on. Even better, the shirt in question was a Ralph Lauren Chaps "Easy Care" brand. 'Easy Care' my arse...... LOL! Now, my other half has no problem with me taking new shirts and re-doing the buttons right away. ;-)

#20 started in my "randomly picked off the shelf" category, but it was so good I used it to start a new category "feeding the writer's brain." Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa. It'll be too abstract for someone looking for the "magic key" to writing, although he does mention it in the P.S. - sit down and write. Hah! Beginning writers hate it when people tell them that's the secret. I loved it though. I won't pretend to understand everything he said, or to know how he reads a novel, but it was refreshing to read about writing from a non-English speaking perspective. He covered some of the same ground English speaking people cover when they talk about the structure and techniques of a novel, but he used completely different terminology and a different approach. For me, it fed my creativity, and that's all I had asked of it.

& the index in the back is a goldmine of fiction to read next, like I needed book bullets from a pro. ;)

...and catching up here too! :)

#21 Great novel to follow Letters to a Young Novelist. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. It's brilliant, and there's not much I can say about it that isn't a spoiler. So, if you can take a mild spoiler, I'll say this: it is sort of about, if it is about anything, a young man who goes to the town of Comala to find his father who, unbeknownst to him, is the Don of Purgatory.

I'm laughing at the discussion of Black Irish. I definitely plan to skip that one. Thanks for taking one for the team!

And you're right, what is with these touchstones? It definitely wasn't the Hobbit.

@240 Would've been far more interesting if Gandolf and a bunch of short hairy-footed guys had dropped in at the police station looking for directions to Smaug's house.

#21 - wow, I'm reading faster than I thought I would, but I am falling behind on the off-the-shelf bit. I'm going to put #21 The Bone Tiki in my YA fantasy section, although it might be a better fit in my mythology section. I don't know my Maori culture well enough to know how much of the book was mythology and how much was made up. Kerry sent me this one from New Zealand, hoping it would be a hit with the reluctant readers I work with. I'm sure it will, as soon as I'm ready to part with it. It's a very fast-paced adventure story with a Maori-"ninja"-warrior and enough fight scenes to keep the Somali boy I talked about last year quite happy. A modern Maori boy crosses his lawyer father by "stealing" a bone tiki from his dead aunt. The aunt had willed it to him, but his father's client made it and claims it is his - and is willing to kill for it. So who is this client? And who has his father become? He didn't used to be this evil.

& if that didn't intrigue you, what if I said the book is a road trip story with a boy, a clown, a dog, and a half-naked zombie warrior. That's pretty much it, but if you're hoping the vintage Volkswagon beetle will survive the trip, you might cry a few tears.

I'm going to finish off one more short story in The Weird: Compendium and then I'll be starting Zoo City. The group read thread for that is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/148951 Please join us!

21 books!! But you started early at least, right? Fun review of Bone Tiki! Hope the somali kid likes it as much as you did!

I did start early, and a lot of the books have been quite short. I'll slow down soon, especially come March when we hit the Count of Monte Cristo group read. The freezing cold has been helping too! My heater has been having trouble keeping the house above the mid 60s (18 celsius?) so the best way to handle it is grab the dog and a book and hide under the covers.

& the kid might not be getting Bone Tiki too soon. ;) I know I'd never get it back and I'm kind of fond of that book.

I did rehome Steel Pelicans today. I offered it to a boy, but didn't talk it up enough first. A girl next to him heard it was from New Zealand and saw the cover. I said "but it's a boy book," and she reached out her arm and I handed it to her. She'll probably give it back to me even though I told her "give it back if you don't like it." I've loaned her a book before and got it back very promptly. Steel Pelicans has a chance of making the rounds through the classroom.

#22 - I finished reading the first tenth of The Weird: Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Yes, tenth actually goes over 400 pages. I can't compete with psutto's mini-reviews of The Weird: Compendium but here are some notes/reactions on what I've read so far. These are all gothic horror from the early 1900s.

The Other Side by Alfred Kubin: Sleeping sickness and rogue animals. What god or American is behind this?

The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford: Shhhh, don't give anyone ideas.

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood: Many of my convention friends have said this is the best piece Blackwood ever wrote. Beautiful descriptions of nature and the supernatural.

The sense of remoteness from the world of human kind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic...

Sredni Vashtar by Saki: Orphan child puts his faith in pet ferret. Brilliant last line!

Casting Runes by M.R. James: Beware of rejection slips.

How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles by Lord Dunsany: Read any Italian fairytales? They love thieves, but nastiness ensues. This story is almost as nasty as the Italian tale Crac and Croc.

The Man in the Bottle by Gustav Meyrink: Predictable and loudly telegraphed plot. Jealous prince... I won't say anymore. You know what jealous princes always do.

The Dissection by Georg Heym: eeyou yucky doo!!! I could've done without this one. Title says it all. Decay juxtaposed with poetry.

The Spider by Hans Heinz Ewers: I loved this one. It reminded me of Carlos Fuentes' Aura. Creepy. Manipulative. Sexual. Medical student volunteers to investigate a series of suicides that all happened in the same room at 6:00 pm on three consecutive Fridays.

The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore: Yes, Tagore. What a shock seeing a Nobel prize laureate from India hanging out in this company of writers. Especially since what I've seen of Tagore's writing before has been quite realistic. As for the story, it's a haunted harem story. Need I say more?

Hi Katie, just dropping by to catch up, glad you enjoyed the Bone Tiki and I hope your Somali boy likes it too.

@247 Hi!!! & thanks.

Bone Tiki sounds interesting. I don't think I've read anything from or about New Zealand yet, so it sounds worthwhile for that aspect alone.

Glad to see you join in the Zoo City group read!

>246 cammykitty: - you're very kind! Glad to see your enjoying it so far & enticing info bits:-)

@249 Bone Tiki is fun. It's "underworld" kind of reminds me of Somtow's Riverrun. Seems like there's lots of good books from NZ - you've just got to find our NZ challenge friends to find out which ones to look at. ;) & liking Zoo City so far. It's unusual to read a book that so obviously is a response to another - The Golden Compass - that is soooo different.

@250 You were inspiring. ;)

I'm looking forward to getting to The Bone Tiki! I have The Taniwha’s Tear on Mt. TBR as well, but they're certainly tricky to get hold of here in the US!

They certainly are hard to find over here! I bookmooched The Bone Tiki from Avatiakh. Otherwise, I'm sure I never would have found it. There are two more??? Cool! I wish books had a more global distribution in general.

#23 in category 12, Animals and Humans. Help for Your Fearful Dog: A Step-by-Step Guide to Helping Your Dog Conquer His Fears by Nicole Wilde. It took me forever to read this book, not because it was bad, but because the task of turning Sage into a confident dog is so daunting!!! I'll be going back through it to make an IEP for my Special Ed dog. (Individual Education Plan). He's still too scaredy dog to get him into a regular obedience class, although we have sat a few times in the dog school and chowed on hot dogs, cheese and turkey. The fact that there are two houses under construction in the neighborhood isn't helping him any!!! He keeps telling me "Mommy, it's loud'n'boomin."

One of the very last sections was on TTouch though, which is a variation on massage that we used to use in our Growly Dog class. The book was saying that TTouch on the hind quarters could help a dog that lowers his tail often. So I tried, and Sage said "not the tail, the tummy instead." He rolled over and wouldn't let me stop. Comfort pig!

->253 cammykitty:
She does spread the NZ-love around - I mooched mine from Kerry as well. :) I think there are four total so far - I'm purely going by the LT series function.

->254 cammykitty:
We takes our bellyrubs whenever we can get them! :)

Cool - I thought there were only three! & yes, Sage thinks he's very clever finding a way to make therapeutic TTouch into a belly rub. ;) He watched me shovel today while they were banging on the house down the street. That was brave!

Does Wilde's work address separation anxiety at all? Our pup is much calmer and happier than he was, but he's still a basketcase when we have to leave him alone...

@257 - yes, there's a complete section on separation anxiety. Patricia McConnell also has a short book I'll be home soon that has a pretty good action plan for separation anxiety, but it isn't the easiest thing to carry out. My boy certainly has separation issues too. He won't eat if I'm not around him, and if I try to crate him he'll flip the crate over bend the wires and go through the top. Ouch! Fortunately, he doesn't damage anything when he's home alone so the crate issue is not good, but not that big of a deal. DAP difuser??? brand name Adaptil. It helps for some dogs.

#25 in adult SF Zoo City. Maybe I've just got some left over orneriness from Black Irish, but really now? The magic set up was good - animal spirits inspired by The Golden Compass - but only murderers have these spirits. The story is set in Johannesburg, which Beukes knows well. Setting well done, some of the characters were interesting, but for me the novel felt very much like what it is - a first novel. As a reader, I wasn't getting the information I needed at the time I needed it. A particular group of murders is all bunched up in the beginning of part II. The plot would've felt tighter and better integrated if she had spread these out throughout the book. We also would've had a better chance at figuring out what she was up to. Many of the events felt tangential to the plot, just there to supply information or as a bit of handwaving. (BTW, why was the first old lady murdered? Just to set Zinzi up? That's a big cost for something that could've been done much more easily.) Beukes could've made her events work harder for her. A few months ago, I saw a documentary on voodoo where the patient had to pick out her medicine (with the aid of an apprentice) from a table covered with dried animal parts. Beukes needed a scene like this and could've folded it into her plot easily. That custom is definitely a part of Zoo City, but she assumed we knew it. A scene certainly would've deepened the atmosphere and increased reader tension. I could deal with those flaws. I was still enjoying the book...

... until about page 300. Now here's the ornery in me. SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Don't read this if you intend to read Zoo City. It has many glowing reviews. Many people love it. I'm just a hater here. Big climax scene. We're at the record moguls house and our heroine's boyfriend is being heroic. While he's being heroic, a white crocodile leaps up from the swimming pool (which hadn't been cleaned for a decade and actually had become a suitable croc habitat) and pulls our would-be hero into the water. The croc swims through the pool, through an underground tunnel, and into a swimming pool + sacrificial chamber. Our heroine, Z for short, follows and gets hit by the croc tail hard enough to break a rib. Okay, so far so good. She gets to ground where her sloth convinces her it isn't safe to do a rescue at the moment, so she waits for the croc to do its "death roll." Our hero is no Steve Irwin. He appears unconscious, and is certainly not doing any crocodile wrestler moves. After croc is done, Z jumps into water and swims to where the croc has been shelving his corpses. She recognizes horribly bloated corpse #1 by his face. ??? Not his clothes??? (IMHO, wouldn't horribly bloated corpse 1. have already been chomped on much by hungry croc. 2. be beyond simple recognition.) Then she finds hero, brings him to surface and does a little mouth to mouth - which works - and then she turns him to his side so the water can run out of his lungs. ??? Wrong order, deary. Really. & btw, how long can a body go without oxygen? Seems like we pushed the outer limit to say the least. Then - are you ready for more? - she uses bloated corpse as a bullet shield. She gets hit by bullet that goes through bloated corpse. Says it was slowed down so it didn't hurt much. - No medical attention for bullet wound? No raging infection? I'm sorry, I can't think of a better incubator for nasty bacteria than a rotting corpse in a crocodile pond. I'm no forensics expert, but ???

In the books defense though, no buttons were sacrificed for the sake of sex.

I didn't spot the mistake about resuscitation, just goes to show what you can miss when your are gripped.

I can't remember who the bloated corpse was so I am not sure I can comment, plus I have no idea which but crocodiles eat ;-) Not sure I would recognise people by their clothes though, unless really obvious but that's just me!

I'm avoiding your spoiler comments since I am reading the book. I will come back to read them after I'm done.

Not reading the review since I am planning on reading it, but hope the Black-Irish-curse goes away soon! :)

It does make us read more critically, though. I've noticed it myself. I think it's a good thing.

>258 cammykitty: Thank you! I'll look into both those books, and adaptil. Our vet recommended we try anxiety medication, which we finally have, and it's gotten rid of most of his shaking during the day, and most of his nightmares, but the separation anxiety is still a big problem :(

@260 - What gets me is everything I pinged on could've been an easy fix. Bloated corpse, fine - she could've just wondered if it was _______ or said about the same size as ________.

& yes, I hope people do go ahead and read Zoo City and hope the stuff that bothered me doesn't bother the rest of you. Yes, it's time for the Black Irish curse to go!

@264 Oh your poor baby!!! He's really a scaredy dog. What anxiety med are you using? Sage is on fluoxitene which is prozac I believe. It's basically an SSRI. I can't decide if it's helping or not. I think the DAP is though.

I was browsing my library's online catalogue a couple of days ago and saw the audiobook of Black Irish on one of the "Coming Soon/New Arrivals" lists. Nearly laughed out loud remembering the discussions about it here!

I think we have Arthur on the same thing--our vet told us it was basically prozac, but generally starts working more quickly. He said that we might switch to regular prozac if we end up needing to use something longterm, though I really want to avoid that :( We'll see, though. We actually thought the nightmares were totally gone until the last few nights, but I've been working longer hours this week, so that might have something to do with the relapse. I'm worried, right now, about next month when I'll have to leave town on three different occasions. My husband will still be around, but now that he's adopted us (which took a month or so), he only seems fully calm when we're both at home...though, admittedly, he's calmer when I'm the one gone as opposed to when my husband is at work! I've ordered both of those books, though, so they may help I hope. My husband has zero dog experience, and I've never dealt with separation anxiety in dogs, so we're learning as we go! The book recs came at a perfect time, though--these last few nights, I think he's had nightmares about the folks who used to own him since he's been more timid, comparable to how he was a month or so ago as opposed to last week. (We're fairly sure he was abused before being a stray, based on his behavior and on various old scars he has). I know every pup is different, but I feel like I'm learning more about dog psychology with him than I did with all of my dogs growing up!

Our rescue dog was badly abused before we got her and she had nightmares in which she would scream in her sleep. It took a few years, but now she chases rabbits instead. I think that with these dogs with bad beginnings the most important things are time and patience. Good luck with your baby.

I started reading your review of Zoo City with interest ... until I hit the spoiler warning. I'm still working on this book so will have to revisit your post once I'm done. :)

@266 - you'll have to borrow it ;) but don't listen to it while you're driving and drinking coffee at the same time. I wouldn't want you to start laughing and then choke. ;)

@267 Jennifer, poor Arthur!!! & poor you. It must be hard to see him having nightmares. I second what Ridgeway says, and speaking of rescue dogs, this is another good dog book: Do Over Dogs: Give Your Dog a Second Chance for a First Class Life. I read it when I was dealing with my poor foster dog. It has a lot of tips for how to deal with a dog that's already been messed up by someone else. I don't remember it saying much about separation anxiety though. More on changing commands to unusual ones because the dog may associate "sit" or other words with harsh punishments, etc. Remember, just like humans, they have good days and bad days. They learn stuff and then regress. It's hard to keep a positive attitude and be patient, but hey, that's what our dogs need from us. Good luck, and I hope Arthur is chasing rabbits instead of running from people in his dreams really soon.

@269 - I'll be interested to see what people think once they're done. I really wish what I'd read was a beta version, because a few edits and it would've been a 4 star read.

& SPOILER WARNING AGAIN - I've got to apologize to Lauren Beukes a little bit. The bloated body was recognized by a cast on his hand which we had seen before. Okay, that I'll believe. As for the other stuff, did I mention the croc was 6 meters long?

#26 goes in my 500 Great Books by Women category. Angela Carter's short story collection Saints and Strangers. 500 says of it Sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, Angela Carter's stories offer a feminist revision of images that lie deep in our collective psyche. Elegantly said, but most of the review was made up of one line synopses of the short stories. If the reviewer had to write more that described the collection as a whole, I think she would feel as daunted by the task as I am.

Most of the stories are based on historic events such as Lizzie Borden's rampage or Edgar Allen Poe's relations with women. Yes some are tragic and some are humorous, but all are quite serious. Carter's intelligent, inquisitive mind is a clear driving force behind all these stories. They are not plot driven, not even character driven. Each story is thickly atmospheric, grounded in a specific place, sometimes described in such detail that it becomes dreamlike or hallucinatory. The people in these stories are both simply people and transcendent, sometimes at the same time. Definitely worth reading, but I'm not sure I can really tell you what you'll find.

Shame you didn't enjoy zoo city more. You have just reminded me that I should read more Angela Carter as a "local" author (well she went to Bristol Uni)

I think Angela Carter is great at short stories, not so enamoured with her books.

I must get around to Zoo City as well. I started it ages ago, and then didn't finish it (not the fault of the book as I was enjoying it).

I wasn't planning to read Zoo City so I read all the comments which had me laughing - but still not enough to entice me to read it.

Thanks--and that's hugely helpful! I hadn't even thought about commands having negative associations--my husband and I have long discovered that "come" gets the opposite response, whereas crouching down or clicking with our tongues works, but we hadn't even thought about trying another word instead of "sit", which also seems to be a word that gets opposite results! (And, sorry to hijack your thread away from book discussions lol.)

With Emmie we were unable to train her at all because anything other that the sweetest, gentlest voice had her terrified. Eventually she just learned what to do. And she's great at abstract things, like knowing the boundaries of our property and refusing to leave it except with us and always coming when called and not running out of the front door when we open it. Our standards are low, however. We just want a family dog to hang out with. Our greyhound is likewise untraditionally trained, but in his case because he is quite remarkably not bright. We were thrilled when he learned his own name.

Never heard of Angela Carter before now -- I'll have to try to remember her name and see if she starts popping up in surprising places.

Hi everyone! Yes, shame about Zoo City. & really, it was just a few minor things that made me want to throw it across the room. I loved Moxyland. Everybody, go read Moxyland. :)

274 Claire - interesting you should say that about Angela Carter's novels. She's most well known as a short story writer, and I've had lots of conversations with authors about "natural lengths" for their style of writing. The stories I've read from The Bloody Chamber had plots, but the ones from Saints and Strangers tended not to really have plots. They work as short stories, but pulling off a plotless novel is a much harder thing to do. It can be done, but not easily. I may try one of her novels eventually, but her writing is hard to find here, and yes it's mostly the stories.

@277 White wave, don't apologize for hijacking. After all, I did and do post a lot of dog behavior books and related dog stories. Yes, what Ridgeway said again. I had an abused foster dog for awhile and the minute he thought I was "training" him, he froze. He was smart and trainable, but terrified of making a mistake. The key here is to keep it light, do short sessions, and trick the dog into thinking you're playing a game. Yes, change commands or don't even use commands at first. Most dogs learn hand signals faster than voice commands anyway. You can try trick training too. Tons of trick books at library and I'm sure you can find some fun tricks on line. Shake counts. If you're teaching something silly, you're not as likely to tense up and give off those "we're training now" vibes. Once he starts learning stuff and being successful, he'll probably start getting into it. Use super food treats - things like hot dog & chicken cut up even smaller than your pinky nail.

& btw, here's the secret to a good recall. Have someone hold your dog. Start about 3 feet away from the dog and gradually work up to greater distances. Turn away from the dog, bounce on your heels a bit, call your dog cheerfully and run away. Your helper should release your dog just as you run. When your dog catches up to you, turn and drop to your knees, praise and treat for one whole minute. Trainers often will tell you to "throw a party" when your dog gets there. With some dogs, you can replace treat with a game of tug a flying tennis ball. If you don't have someplace fenced to do this, you can practice in the hallways or put the dog on a long line.

#27 (12 off the shelf - still running behind on the off the shelf count) is Day of Tears by Julius Lester. It is a book about the largest slave auction in US history. Remember those discussions we've had about the difference between audio and print? This one is a case in point. I tried "reading" this short novel on audio a few months back and couldn't stand it. I remember wondering who was talking and thinking to myself, yes I know, you said that about the rain already. The list of slaves being auctioned felt interminable!

I'd read Julius Lester's work before and had great respect for him, and respect for people who have told me that the Day of Tears is a great book so I gave it a shot in print. What a difference! There was a list of characters and their relationship to each other, just like in a play guide. The story is told in chorus, very much like a play, and in print it is very clear who is talking when. Audio, not so much. In print, the poetry came out. It didn't feel rushed. The emotions were subtle and profound.

It's a very quick read, designed for a YA audience. Simple language. Doesn't get gory, but also doesn't gloss over slavery. Matter of fact, I was impressed in how Lester was able to show so many diverse opinions and experiences with slavery in such a short book. I wouldn't hesitate in giving this to a middle school kid who is curious about slavery and wants to read a good book. Even though there is no main character, there is enough detail in the characters' lives that a kid will find someone to connect with. 5 star.

Nice review, I admit I can't stand audio books something in them that deadens the imagination. I think it's the singular voice, the slowness and the fact most books dont have a rhythm to be read out.

Re: Angela Carter. I would recommend Nights at the Circus over her earlier works. I still mean to try Wise Children myself. Oh and how can I forget, it's probably horrible dated now, but the film The Company of Wolves was fab when I was young, she adapted it from her short story.

Claire - the rhythm was definitely the worst thing about the audio of Day of Tears. They rushed it. Nights at the Circus is going right on the WL!!! I liked Richardderus's comment about her. Gone these 20 years and still I long for a new book by her. There's that feeling to her writing - that there isn't enough of it and more must be coming out, someday.

#28 in my Mysteries section Bimbos of the Death Sun. My side still hurts from laughing. OMG - this is book is almost as fun as being at a really good SF&F convention. Reminds me of the one I was at where Harlan Ellison-circle R was the Guest of Honor. Um, yeah. To anyone who told him he was a writer and wanted him to recommend a book to read, he answered "Strunk and White" and some book that's title sounded like an odd Scandinavian souffle. You had to sneeze after saying the title. A couple of my friends went all through the con looking for someone who had heard of it and could shed some light on it (and trust me, if you can't find someone who has heard of a particular book at one of these cons, it's a super rare book - far more rare than "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.") Nearly at the end of the con, she waited to talk to him again at his book signing (where his wife was sitting next to him saying "be nice Harlan,") and accused him of making up a book. He did a good job of looking genuinely hurt and said "Why would I do that to you? It's my favorite book. More people should read it." It turned out the book really did exist, but I haven't heard of anyone scoring a copy of it.

So, anyway, Bimbos of the Death Sun. I'd heard Sharyn McCrumb was really one of us, but I didn't believe it until I read this. Yes, it's a murder at a SF&F Convention, but she couldn't possibly have gone to just a few cons to get this one right. It was full of inside fandom jokes and even a sort of prescient knowledge of fandom. If you *get* fandom, this is a must-read.

I just bought the Kindle version Bimbos of the Death Star after reading your review.

I have never been to a proper sci-fi convention as we don't have the population to have a real one down here (we do have something that they try to pass off as being a sci-fi convention) and I can't really afford to travel to and stay in Sydney during one there.

If you like depictions of sci-fi conventions, try We'll always have parrots by Donna Andrews. Actually, it's more of a television series convention, but it's fun.

Bjace -thanks for the suggestion. I have added it to my wishlist.

Bjace - yes, thanks. Zozette - aw, too bad Sydney isn't more do-able. They had World Fantasy down there about 4 years ago. That would've been an awesome experience! You're little one that you "pass off" as a SF Con is probably closer than you think! My favorite Con averages around 100 attendees, and you seem to get the experience in microcosm. The larger Cons always have livelier panel discussions though. Hope you enjoy Bimbos!

Just so you have a taste of Harlan Ellison circle r, this is him being polite. I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.

I've had Bimbos of the Death Sun on my WL for a while now. Guess I should actually get around to picking it up one of these days. The follow-up book, Zombies of the Gene Pool doesn't seem to garner the same kind of praise though.

I'd love to know what the Scandinavian souffle-book was! :)

I usually go to the Comicon in San Diego and it's HUGE, i.e. last year, the attendance was 130,000+, which is a lot of fun, obviously, but can get a bit too crowded as well. Highly recommended if anyone is planning a holiday to my neck of the woods, but buy tickets early!!

Oh my - looks like people hated Zombies. Wasn't set at a Con - perhaps a fatal flaw - and I haven't read Zombies of course, but she was skirting that line of mocking her audience in Bimbos. Just the title, Zombies, sounds like she may have crossed it.

I'd love to know what the souffle book was too. I've tried googling it, but most lead to books by Harlan that are favorites. Anna might remember??? Comicon sounds like great fun. I know some people around here go. I'd be a fish out of water though. I know and love The Watchmen but after that, I don't know my Comics at all.

Harlan's souffle doesn't show up in this one. Big Little Books??? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpsIdpeDYxw Member of the Big Little Book Society of America??? He's totally destroying his image as the orneriest SF writer ever to have a Star Trek planet named after him. Matter of fact, he's treading on infomercial ground.

Speaking of CONs, my friends just talked me into going to CONvergence. One of them used to be the costume designer for our local Ren Fest, and she and her Court Revelers are going in costume as: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKfbSHW9uGA Yes, the wedding scene in Black Adder. My friend, female, is Flashheart - woof woof. Her husband gets to be Baldric. I think they have a woman playing Bob, but don't be so sure. & the costume for Edmund? They aren't going to charge labor, but the materials came to $400. - real leather. The costumes will be used at festival as well (probably for years), so for them, it's worth it. The pearls on Queenie's dress? I can't imagine how much time that will take!

But this is a surprise, so, shhhh don't tell anyone.

Says the woman to the internet. ;)

I keep forgetting to register for CONvergence. I swear I'll remember someday....

!!! I'll get to meet you then, Pam!!! Do it before May. I think that's when the price goes up. I meant to go last year, but kept forgetting to register. The price changes to $100. :( I can't afford that!

I've made Medieval and Renaissance costumes and, yes, they are labor intensive. I've spent many an evening half watching TV while sewing on trims and beads. It was fun, though.

I'm sure it was tons of fun, but an all-consuming hobby. :)

RidgewayGirl - where was it you worked again? Someone talked about this publisher: http://www.concordfreepress.com/ They send free copies of books to people who promise 1. to donate to charity of person's choice. 2. to pass the book on to someone else. They've got a Lucius Shepard novel, so of course I have to have it, and your books for kids organization is my charity of choice.

What an amazing idea! And thank you, too! Here's where to donate:

http://booksforkeeps.blogspot.com

Thanks!!! I'll do that soon!

I've been away from LT, so I'm dropping in to say thanks for the further suggestions and wave hello now that I've caught up :) I can add an entertaining development from our anxious hounddog though--he now likes to hold hands. He'll paw at us for attention occasionally, especially when the cats are on our laps, and it turns out that he's never happier than when we just catch his paw and hold hands with him while he's laying beside us! So, one dog for the cat, one for the dog...and none for LT. I actually sat with an open computer on my lap for an hour yesterday, one hand petting the needy cat and one hand holding Arthur's hand/paw!

And, meanwhile, Bimbos of the Death Sun is now on my wishlist tbr!

@302 LOL!!! That's so sweet!!!

Hope you enjoy Bimbos when Arthur lets you get to it. ;)

I went into B&N to find out what their free book was today, and ended up buying a new, for real paper book. Drat their marketing schemes!!! But this is what the book is. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison It'll be worth the $13 I paid for it. I've already forgotten what the free book was. Some SF/political thriller thing. Poor forgettable free book.

LOL! Not sure if book-addict walking into a bookstore and exiting with a book technically qualifies as a "marketing scheme," but I like the way you think.

Busted! Eva you totally busted me.

Silly me - can't sleep tonight so I'm planning 2014. Next year's award category will be one of these:
1001 books to read...
Alex Award
Barry Award (mystery)
Edgar Award
Horn Book Fanfare Best Book
Hugo
John W Campbell award
Lambda Literary Award
Locus Award
Minnesota Book Award
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
Nebula
World Fantasy Award

The global category will be Central America, or Central America + Columbia and Venezuela

Am I nuts, or what?

307. You're not nuts. I've been planning 2014 too. We're just, ehm, foresighted.

I am another person already already planning for next year - mainly because my moneyboxes are almost full and I will be cashing them in soon (and I always spend the money on books).

Playing in the Dark is a wonderful read--I do hope you enjoy it! You're all tempting me to plan for the next year, but I won't, because I know I'd only end up keep planning and re-planning straight through until it started!

I spent last night reviewing my TBR pile to see what type of themes I could come up with for next year. Great minds think alike.

Oh my! We are all too alike. Either we're the sane ones, or we're engaging in group insanity.

@310 - Glad to hear Playing in the Dark is fantastic. It's Toni, so of course I knew it would be. I've been reading The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier so have been thinking about how groups are subtly marginalized by exclusion. How to keep women out of the sciences? Step 421 Never depict them in any fictional, science-related activities. No one will notice we're doing it, not even ourselves.

Not Toni's genre, but I'm sure she's had similar experiences.

#29 takes us to the more serious side of fandom and science fiction conventions, the side that is actively trying to better the world. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier is a short book (under 250 pages if you don't count the notes and bibliography) but it takes some time and emotional energy to read it properly. People like Joanna Russ and Ursula LeGuin had already changed Science Fiction by the time I became a reader. I always knew women had a long way left to go, but this book shows the origins and the context of the "battle" in a way I hadn't thought of before. I hadn't thought of the fact that women had just won the right to vote in the United States at the time that the first Science Fiction magazines, fanzines and pulps were getting their start. Of course I knew the farther we go back into history, the more of a men's world it was. I hadn't thought of this as "segregation" though, which in many ways it was.

I'll be going back and looking at older works of SF for awhile. I loaded up my nook with cheap $2 anthologies of Golden Age sf. I'll be mulling this over, especially as I write my next probably never to be published novel, set in an alternate 1890s but with more gender and racial equality than there certainly was. Even with a strong female protagonist though, I realized I might fail the Bechdal test. My male characters are outnumber my females. See, gender stereotyping has gotten to me too.

The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier was initially going to go under my category "feeding the writer's brain" but I'm moving it to the Tiptree section. Each chapter is titled after one of Tiptree's stories. The second to last chapter is a quite interesting fandom tale - who everyone thought James Tiptree, Jr really was. They got a lot of it right, but certainly Robert Silverberg never guessed Tiptree didn't have male plumbing. The last chapter is about the award itself which I read nostalgically. I used to be able to go to WisCon where the award ceremony is held. It's the funniest award ceremony for a serious award ever. Sigh, I need a new job so I have money and a chance to slip out of town for a week right at the end of the school year. Larbelastier has served on the Jury for the Tiptree award, so I find it fitting that her academic work rub shoulders with the novels she has helped promote.

The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction sounds fascinating -- I'm going to have to look for that one.

Pam, I think you'll like it. Quite a few Connie Willis quotes in it, and quite a few quick synopses of some g-awful plots. ;)

Interesting book. I did the Bechdel test last year but I had to stop as it was making me grumpy! So few modern books pass & when they do you realise how few women populate the background: the barman, shopkeeper, policemen etc..

@316 The Bechdal test would make me grumpy too - especially when conversations between two women about a man doesn't count. What if the man is a family member? It is good to keep in the back of your mind though. I'm glad people are talking about it, I'm sure to Bechdal's surprise. I think wikipedia says more about the Bechdal test than she did. I thought Bechdal was a literary critique, not a cartoonist!

#30 passes the Bechdal test if talking about new born baby brothers is not considered talking about men. Under Shifting Glass is my latest ER novel and it looked like it was going to be a fantasy. It isn't. Yes, the girl sees something rather like what a soul might look like in an antique bottle that once belonged to her recently deceased great-aunt, Aunt Edie (which makes me laugh because I had a great-aunt Edith too, only she was nicknamed Aunt Eader, yup like Aardvark.) Instead the novel examines mysticism, superstition and skepticism while Jess copes with the health issues of her little brothers, newly born conjoined twins.

My real review is here if you're interested. 4 1/2 stars which from me is a pretty high rating for an ER book, especially one I didn't expect to really like when I was 20 pages into it.
http://www.librarything.com/work/book/94065589#

318. If I were to decide on such matters, I would say that a book passes the test if the discussion about a man would be identical if they had been talking about a woman (i.e. it's not the gender of the person that is important).

Ugh. Do you realize we're trying to find some way to make that single, brief conversation between two women in an entire book work to pass the Bechdel test? It's such a minimal standard. Surely there's something wrong here! SF/Fantasy is one of the genres that most needs to get its act together. Luckily, there are quite a few strong female authors now, as well as talented male authors who "get it".

319-320 Both good points - and to be fair to Under Shifting Glass, there were a lot of conversations between females. It probably passes the Bechdal test even if we're strict about it. It's just most of the conversations were lengthy ones that eventually turned to the big event of the book, the lives of the boy twins - which could've just as well have been girls. The only thing that might have changed is that Jess might not have thought of two healthy girls helping her father working on the car, but then again she might have. After all, she helped her father with the car.

I think the sadder thing is not just that there are few books that pass the Bechdel test there also seem to be fewer female authors - as I don't pick books based on gender you'd expect my reading to be 50/50 - however so far this year out of 51 books 7 have been written by women, I seem to remember a similar split last year too

323. For me, this year, it's been 3 out of 11 (counting the books I'm currently reading too).

Maybe it's genre? I did notice that of the five books I'm currently reading, all are by men but so far this year two-thirds have been by women.

I've read non-genre and non-fiction this year as well as the genre books ("Speculative fiction" or SF&F take your pick what lebel you prefer!) as well as plenty of GN so not sure it is a genre thing...

It's not a genre thing - with the exception of Romance/Chick lit - you'll find the men outnumber the women. I've been watching this for years. The numbers look closer in YA lit, but even now YA lit courses are telling people that it's better to chose a boy protagonist than a girl because girls will read books with boy protags but boys won't read books with girl protags - which has lead to a lot of joint protags, one of each gender. Personally, I trust our young kids more than that. I think they'll read books with strong characters, regardless of gender, but that's the message out there which is shaping the books available.

Perhaps the most telling anecdotal evidence is from one of my friends, Kelly McCullough. Kelly is a fantasy writer and he tried getting his short stories published in magazines for a long, long time. Then he stuck his middle name in there, Kelly David McCullough, and surprise surprise, he sold his first story. He has several novels out now and doesn't use the middle name as his publishing name anymore, but he believes it helped him break through.

I'm at 15/15 - so that's half & half, but I have two feminist categories - Tiptree and 500 books by women. & those categories/interests have spilled into the other categories. For example, I thought Red Heart of Memories was on the shortlist for a Tiptree but it was something else of Nina's - and yes I met Nina and picked up that book at WisCon, which is a feminist sf&f con. Red Heart had to go into the adult sf&f category then. For my Mexican writer's category, anyone who has been following my Spanish Language reviews knows the first thing I always say was "where were the women in this collection?" Steven03tx helped me find contemporary Mexican women writers for that category - hence Elena Poniatowska. None of the Mexican women are authors you would be likely to stumble across in the US. Carlos Fuentes yes, Elena Garro no. Half & half, and that's after consciously correcting for gender balance.

> 316 - 327 - Great discussion! Usually my author gender reading is pretty balanced. So far this year, my reading has been skewed towards female authors. Not sure how long that will last. Of the 15 books I have completed - one of which is an anthology with both male and female authors - my reading has been 4 male to 12 female - 13 female if I count the fact that one of my books had two female authors.

Interesting Lori - your categories don't seem to be particularly designed to favor one gender or another. No, I don't think there are a lot of men writing regency, and Mitford can only be Jan Karon, but other than that your categories aren't designed to favor women. Now I'm almost curious to see a straw pole on how we read, and how many of us consciously consider gender when we pick up a book. I do sometimes, but if I've seen good reviews and a book sounds interesting, I really don't care who wrote it. I'll read it.

Of the 14 books I've read so far, only 4 male authors and 10 female. And last year only 26 male out of 88 books read. So it would seem I tend to favor female authors, although I don't think it's a conscience decision. And I know there are plenty of male authors in my TBR pile.

Interesting discussion! I'll have to try to find my stats!

When I started thinking about gender balance in my reading, I was fairly certain that I read more female authors than male regularly. I did an actual count and, to my surprise, found that my reading split straight down the middle. Although I'm embarassed to admit that I wasn't sure what gender Mazo de la Roche was at first. (Comes of being an ignorant American.)

Oh dear out of 18 books only 2 are by women. I don't tend to read romance (or paranormal romance) books but that really shouldn't matter.

I remember very interesting survey that was picked up last year about gender bias not only on authors but also the gender of book reviewers and authors of magazine articles. Guess what they found? This of course raises the question of the effect when there are more male editors and reviewers....

2011 stats here:
http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count
and article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/02/gender-bias-books-journalism-vida

Interesting discussion about gender. When I was looking at my January stats I was surprised that the balance is definitely in favour of women: 8 women to 6 men so far this year.

Interesting article, clfisha. I was uncomfortable with Jennifer Weiner's comments when she made them, since her lack of literary awards isn't at all due to her gender, but to the fact that she writes light, breezy entertainments. She wasn't arguing on behalf of women authors saying new and interesting things, but on behalf of her own empty awards case. I can't comment on Jodi Picoult, as I haven't read her. I do remember Nicholas Sparks kicking up a fuss about how he writes just like Hemingway, but no one gives him awards because he's a best-selling author and no one likes him. Writers can often over-value their work.

Which is entirely off-topic.

Congrats on Hot Review for Under Shifting Glass!!

I got a Hot Review??? I think that's my first. Thanks! & thanks to everyone that thumbed it.

@333 Claire, thanks!!! Interesting article and statistics. Those numbers are far worse than I thought. Far worse! Makes me feel like I should send off a letter to the nearest publication that reviews books and say "Hey, you need me. I'm female." I'm actually really surprised and disturbed by the numbers. Even publications that have female editors didn't have balanced numbers. ??? I'm totally confused now.

& I couldn't read the article on VS Naipaul. Speaking of authors who lack humility!!! (Ridgeway, you hit it on the head - seems to be a problem for both genders). Yes, Naipaul was asked a leading question, but he's an intelligent man. He wouldn't have said that women's writing is inferior to his unless he meant it. And as for knowing "within a paragraph or two" if a piece was written by a man or a woman, talk to Robert Silverberg. Talk to Gordon van Gelder. Silverberg was sure that Tiptree was a man, and Gordon Van Gelder has been addressing one of my female friends with a gender neutral pen name as Mr. after a particular story she submitted. As far as I know, there is not a DNA test available for the written word.

Note to self - never pay $ for a book written by Naipaul.

I loved V.S. Naipaul until he opened his mouth and proved himself an idiot. I haven't read him since, but I can't quite bear to part with my copies of A Bend in the River and A Turn in the South. I can forgive bigotry in dead guys whose views echoed the values of their time, but can't see past it in contemporary authors.

Interesting discussion of gender balance! I belong to an SF book club for women run by one of my friends. At first, I wondered whether there really was any benefit in restricting the club to women, but the discussion and choice of books do seem to be different. (I work with a number of male SF fans and have had plenty of book-related discussions with them too.)

I also enjoyed Bimbos of the Death Sun and have been wanting to go to a con ever since. FanExpo in Toronto is not too far from my home, so maybe I'll give it a try this year.

@339 I've heard so many good things about V.S. Naipaul too and I've got one of his books that I got from a library book sale, but at the moment I'm feeling like picking it up with tongs and chucking it in the trash with the dog poop - but I won't today. I always say when you're angry, wait a day and then decide what you want to do. I may want to read him anyway, but it reminds me of the time I read Strindberg in college. They made us read his introduction to Miss Julie, and I couldn't calm down enough to concentrate on the play. The intro blathered on about Social Darwinism and the inferiority of women and the servant class. Miss Julie might have had something to recommend it, but I understood his agenda all too well.

@340 I hope you do get to go to FanExpo!!! You'll have a blast. I've heard there's a chocolate centered SF&F con in Canada. I met some guys years ago that claimed to be the planners of it. They seemed legit, but they might have realized I was a chocoholic and were just trying to see if they could get me to sign up for a con that didn't exist.

I'll bet your book club is great. I'd love to see what your group decides to read.

RE V.S. Naipal I admit its put me off his books too, but I still would recommend his non fiction Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. No female characters to stereotype :)

@335 I agree. Authors who say they don't win the award because of X need to be taken with a pinch of salt, especially after Hilary Mantel. Then again there is the Women's prize for Fiction.. but the reason for positive discrimination is probably more due to small amount of female authors.. and it to falls into bias against genre (separate argument)

@341 I know, it does make wonder if there is a self perpetuating circle going on and its weird the reviewer gender bias must be easier to fix. I can see balancing authors could take decades.

Naipaul's an amazing author. His books are full of empathy and understanding of the human condition. Oddly, this is not the case for himself. I don't know how that can be, I really don't.

I think I'll just put off reading Naipaul for another year and hopefully by then I will have forgotten what came out of his mouth. ;) Sadly, there are very few great artists have lead highly commendable lives. Which is why sometimes it's best to not know!

As for authors, I don't care what gender they are, when it comes to talking about honors or awards they haven't received, they should just not do it unless they can do it with the grace of Charlie Stross who said once something like this: "I didn't win the Nebula this time. Why didn't I win the Nebula? Because forgot author's name just wrote the best d@mn book of his career, that's why."

& I'm not into blaming the women for being left behind, but I do wonder if there isn't some sort of self-perpetuating circle going on, and lack of confidence may be a factor. ??? I totally don't know. Like I said, I'm surprised the statistics are so poor.

I think it's more that men gravitate naturally to books written by the guys they went to school with and, more generally, books by men. It's a comfort thing that requires a concerted effort to overcome.

@345 You're probably right.

Yeah I agree, a lot of fiction is wish fulfilment so more male reviewers perhaps more promotion of that. Then again there are loads of women who love things like the Dresden series or Tolkien so who knows.

I also think that if the bias doesn't involve a group you are part of you are probably not as sensitive to it i.e. gender stereotyping, the odious token "Strong Sexy Female Character (TM)"

I don't think it's as easy as that. Men wanting to read "about themselves and their friends" doesn't explain why women read more male authors than female ones (I know I do, and other LTers seem to have the same issue).

Maybe the average woman is more comfortable with her masculine side than the average man is with his feminine side.

349. Ooh, talk about "masculine" and "feminine" sides makes my skin crawl.

It's also expectation and packaging. It's acceptable for a woman to be seen in public reading Tom Clancy. It isn't acceptable for a man to be seen with the latest by Jodi Picoult. There's a perception that some books are "women's fiction" and therefore only for the ladies.

I listened to a literary round table on the BBC once in which there were four male authors, all of whom had written Very Serious Books and Marian Keyes. They had each read the others' books and discussed them. To their astonishment, the men had all enjoyed Keye's "Chick-Lit" novel very much and thought the themes were important and worth discussing. But they all admitted that they had only read the book in the privacy of their own homes.

In this area, I think both men and women are ill-served. Women, because they do have to work harder and write better books to receive the same notice and because their very good books can end up relegated to the "women's fiction" ghetto, while an identical novel by a male author is treated as literary fiction. Men, because they are missing out on some great books.

Very interesting discussion about gender. I checked and my reading so far this year seems to be about two male authors to one female.

Great discussion everyone. I think Ridgeway has a point. I know plenty of guys who have admitted to liking Pride and Prejudice and I'm always shocked - first that they read it, second that they liked it. I've seen something like this during summer school. One of the boys was reading Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner and when I asked him to tell us about it he told us all about the romantic plotline (which isn't very strong in the novel) and forgot to mention details like the boy was a werewolf or that the girl had to leave her village because she was gaining magic abilities. I figured out then that if you could package a romance in a macho enough way, the boys would be lapping it up. Too bad Son of the Mob has a huge rose on the cover - that blows it for the male audience. Son is by Gordon Korman, so not a female author, but it's a real tough sale to boys and they'd like it if they could get past the cover.

Obviously this gender-bias issue is very complicated and there's lots of factors at work.

I don't know, Ridgeway.... Do you really think that a male writer emulating Jodi Piccoult would be treated (seriously) as literary fiction? Most of what you say I agree with, but that one strikes me as stretching a bit far....

I think there're some other factors going on there beyond the existence of a women's ghetto. I'm struggling to articulate the one I haven't seen here yet. Essentially, I see something interesting in a comparison between my "women's fiction" go-to genre and tropes (namely those of high-quality fanfic, since I have not extensively read the likes of Jodi Piccoult) and my "men's fiction" genre and tropes (namely just about anything else I've ever read). The way in which fanfic is intertextual is a very different way from how Dickens or even Octavia Butler is intertextual. I'd like to argue that people "naturally" understand the Dickens kind -- and therefore understand the richness of the story upon an initial read -- not because it is natural, but because we've been continuously exposed and explicitly taught for many years how to relate to it. Being explicitly taught something makes it easier, which makes it more enjoyable, and more likely to be replicated in the future.

Though, on second thought, perhaps the point I'm making is just another the feminism 101 observations that people have been making all along: women's fiction (everything within that genre) is devalued because it is targeted at women and therefore no one except the committed care enough to unpack the ways in which it is transcendent, whereas men's fiction (everything within that genre) is valorized not so much because it is targeted at men as because it is believed to be universal, and because it is believed to be universal, how to "read" it effectively is a skill taught and graded in schools, and men's fiction becomes self-fulfilling.

I think the only genre where I would read women authors as much as men authors would be Scandinavian crime fiction. I wonder how many men read authors such as Yrsa Sigurdsdottir, Mari Jungstedt and Karin Fossum?

Reading more books by male authors isn't a really conscious decision for me and yet when I look through the list of 19 books I have read this year only 4 have been written by women.

Great discussion going on over here.

I've just taken a look at my stats from last year and so far this year, and I've got 21 male authors and 31 female authors, but from my overall library it's pretty close to 50:50.

Author gender is not a conscious decision for me either but it is very much genre dependant. Historical fiction, romance and chick lit are almost always female authors, and fantasy and non fiction are strongly biased toward male authors. NZ fiction and YA/Children's fiction goes either way.

Yes interesting discussion - I don't think a male author emulating Jodi Piccoult would be taken seriously, not because of anything lacking in her writing - I wouldn't know, I've never been drawn to her novels and have never read them - but because it wouldn't be authentic. It would be an imitation, and presumably an imitation outside of his experience.

Yes, I agree we've been taught that "men's issues" are transcendent - such as war, career, existentialism, poverty, science etc - and that "women's issues" - motherhood, love, anthropology - aren't so much. However, there's nothing strictly gendered about any of these issues. Men experience motherhood by being fathers, by having wives who experience it, by having mothers. Women can go to war (although slight snark here, only just recently in the US have they truly been allowed to go to war). Shakespeare wrote about love.

As Ridgeway mentioned, men read about "women's issues" and sometimes enjoy it and often value it. I think marketing really is a part of the piece. If a book is targeted to a female audience, say it's titled something like Shopaholic and Baby or it has Fabio on the cover, of course no man is going to read that on the bus. Those examples aren't great literature, but there are male equivalents too - World of Warcraft novels for example, or the novels with the chick with anti-gravity boobs being abducted by something green on the cover. Think Boris Vallejo (but his wife painted that kind of female too). Hmmm... I'm not sure where I'm going with this, because I wouldn't be caught reading those "male" examples on the bus either. My inner Victorian comes out when I see Vallejo art. Do men have inner Victorians? I hope not.

Speaking of something that passes the Bechdal test #29-30 in my "Begged/Borrowed/Stolen" category The Book Thief. It is the book that has languished the longest on my wishlist. It was entered in September of 2010, just a few months after I joined LT. Fantastic book. 5 star, but I'm mourning the characters. I didn't need any more mourning this month. - And on a critical aside, sounds like almost all the adult readers love this book, but I've only talked to two girls about it. One is still reading it and she loves it. The other gave up on it. Here's the issue. If a child doesn't know much about World War II, The Book Thief doesn't make sense. It requires a fair amount of background knowledge - knowledge every well-educated adult has. Every middle schooler though? They know Hitler was bad, but they don't know why yet. In our school, that's not until 8th grade.

Speaking of Bechdel, #33 in the Graphic novel memoir category Fun Home by Alison Bechdel almost failed the Bechdel test. This is a fantastic and painful memoir about Bechdel's childhood that focuses on her father and the tense/toxic atmosphere the dishonesty over his sexuality created. Why did she almost fail the Bechdel test? One, this was about her father. Two, she was writing about a family where no one talked to each other. She compared it to an artist community where everyone did their own thing until meal time. At first I thought, wow, how cool would that be, but then I thought about what she was really saying, what that would be like day after day. Isolation. Detachment. Certainly not the ideal situation for a growing child.

Tragicomedy? Hmmm. The humor was grim, and at times more hysteria than ha ha. This certainly isn't the sitcom/soap opera style that I saw in Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. (I was looking for the cartoon where the test came to be, but couldn't find it.) If you're looking for a rich, conflicted portrait of father/daughter family dynamics though, Fun Home is your book. 5 star.

& btw, if you can get hold of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, take a look at her introduction even if you aren't too interested in the rest of the cartoons. She talks about how she only drew men when she was starting out. - What does that mean about gender bias?

Makes you wonder if gender bias starts young - do children's books start people down this road? if so at what age - I mean for example has the hungry caterpiller gender bias? Well he is a he and not a she or an it....

I think also the natural assumption in non-fiction like instruction manuals etc (I've noticed this more in rulebooks for games actually) usually have "he" as the assumed reader although some have the awkward he/she or s/he or use he for 50% and she for 50%

I'm coming to this discussion late (though I've lurked on and off!), but I wanted to add that it might have something to do with the way we read as children, too. Growing up, the boys I knew were more likely to read sci-fi and/or adventure type writing for children than more straight-forward stories closer to reality, and the same goes for the boys I babysit (from a couple of different families). While girls (including myself) strayed into the choose-your-own-adventures and sci-fi reads, some also stayed well within realistic reads (Babysitter's club, Little House on the Prairie, etc.); as for me, I never even stuck to Nancy Drew since I saw those books as more tame than the Hardy Boys books, which I really gravitated to.

I do think that the kids who read grow up to be readers. So, if girls grow up reading realistic and romance based situations, and not looking for or being exposed to more, they're likely to see out the same as adult readers. Many of the guys I know don't read straight fiction at all, by men or women--they read sci-fi, some fantasy, and they read nonfiction. I'm pretty sure those tastes all just got further developed from when they were young...

Of course, I may be a bad person to chime in; I hate drawing lines between genders (for any reason), and I was incredibly unimpressed with the one Piccoult book I read--I found her writing rather terrible :( I do love Alice Hoffman, though, who I have a feeling most would compare....

@359&360 Pete, I think you're onto something here. Studies are showing that we start teaching kids gender roles unconsciously and at a very early age. The books, and the way the books are written, certainly are a part of that piece. I'm just guessing that Bechdel would've, like you Whitewave, been picking the Hardy Boys over Nancy Drew because they were a bit more "wild."

Maybe the roots of this is very subconscious, and clearly it goes back both to each persons childhood and back in societies history.

&Wave, something in your post triggered this thought for me. Most of my involvement with "feminism" was in the 80s, and at that time there was so much mocking of the 50s housewife and a devaluing of motherhood. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and often felt uncomfortable with that, even though she had a college degree in chemistry, had worked as a chemist and a lab technician before deciding to have kids late in life. At some point, I remember having a discussion with someone and stating what may sound obvious, but was definitely being lost at the time. The point of feminism isn't to say being a housewife or mother or nurse is bad. The point is to give women more possible futures (and equal pay of course). - So yes, the ultimate goal is to go beyond gender so a man can write "like Piccoult" or a woman "like Hemingway."

I'm just interested at how this is shaking out. I think a lot of people, both men and women, are onboard with the basic concepts of feminism but for some reason the publishing/litary world (and business world) doesn't reflect that. ???

Am I making sense? I'm starting to feel like I've been poking at a windmill with a pointy stick.

There is something there. It rings of someone's advice I recall when asked how to get more professors of color into an academic department (or anywhere else) -- you have to figure out what the credentials are, and then from the people with those credentials, you pick the more diverse ones. This means that you effectively treat a poor poor black professor like the white professor who has fantastic resume made possible through privilege. If both have the credentials and diversity is important, you have to weight "of color" similar to the other things that go into these calculations unthinkingly.

Where I am going with this is-- that is difficult to do in practice. If a particular publisher gets 75% submissions from men and 25% from women f a pparticular caliber, then does a publisher wwho values equality not publish 50% of the work, and refuse only that from men?

There is no good solution to any of this. All you can try to do is be self-aware and not dismiss particular works solely because of gender....

So true Pam, and a publisher probably isn't thinking of diversity... er, I mean "equity." That's the new buzz word for treating all people equal regardless of race, gender, orientation etc.

Speaking of another form of equity, people with disabilities. #34 (biography/anthropology) is Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, a quick academic read on recessive deafness on Martha's Vineyard. Groce looked at tons of genealogical records and interviewed many elderly people, then combined her research with the research of... of all people... Alexander Graham Bell to explore the pattern of deafness in the at one time closed community of Martha's Vineyard. Four different families original to the island came from the same part of Kent in England where there was a form of hereditary deafness. It was recessive, so it might not show up for a few generations and then, surprise, 1 out of 4 children in a family would be deaf. It appeared to be random deafness, and some people even said it was because of the salt water in the air on a particular part of the island. For three hundred years, there were so many deaf people on the island that deafness wasn't seen as a disability and everyone learned sign language as a baby. Often they were signing before they were speaking.

As lot of the deaf on the island did better than the hearing because there was a free school for the deaf in Massachusetts. Their hearing neighbors would come to them to have documents read. This is in stark contrast to the common beliefs of the time, that the deaf were little more than "dumbe animals." Yes, I put the e at the end of dumb deliberately because that's how they spelled it back them, which to me looks, well, dumb.

I was slightly disappointed in the book because I was looking for a language geek out - how would language develop differently in a bilingual, sign & spoken, community? Unfortunately, by the time Groce did her research the last deaf person had died and only the elderly fully used sign, although there are a lot of signs that have become common gestures among the community.

However, the book compensated me well for the lack of linguistics by showing an alternate way society can adapt to accommodating people with differences. I'm batting it around in my head to see if there's a way this can be extended into education or in to adult society. The school I work in is to some extent bilingual - English/Spanish. There are so many Spanish speakers that the kids are picking up slang phrases like "guey" and of course a few worse phrases. If you had a high enough deaf population, I'm sure that would happen to. Problem is you can't deliberately increase the number of people with disabilities to make society adapt. So the trick perhaps is visibility.

That's a classic deaf studies book. I'm really glad you got something out of it, even if it wasn't what you expected. I'd assume that in an environment like that, there was no disability to being deaf. Isn't that a lesson that the best dual language immersion programs are using? -- reduce the impact of being natively a Spanish speaker to the same as being a native English speaker, leveling the field...?

Though I think that Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language was an interesting read I glad that I read Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind soon after because Talking Hands was about one of the newest sign languages and about an isolated community (a Bedouin village in Israel) that is as acceptng of deafness as the Martha's Vineyard community was. Also,while the researchers were in the village 6 different languages where being used between the various people gathered there (Israeli Sign Language, American Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, . Hebrew, Arabic and English)

@365 I should've realized Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language was a classic in it's field. It was obviously painstakingly researched. Yes, it was the perfect model of an immersion society.

@366 I think I've got Talking Hands on my WL already. If not, it's going to be soon. It sounds fascinating and perhaps a little closer to what I was looking for. Not that it's a problem that Everyone wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I'm used to books being surprises. If I already knew what was in them, what would be the point to reading them?

Wow, a lot going on here in the last week. Just did some pretty hefty catching up. I really enjoyed the discussion on gender. I think most of what I'd add has already been covered, but I would aboslutely put my money on the "Man is representing Humanity, Woman is representing Woman"- thought pattern. As well as what's going on in children's literature, which is of course mostly mirroring the prevailing world order. I'm reading a lot of wordless picture books to Minna at the moment, and talking about the depicted rabbits, polar bears and horses, my instinct is always to call them "he". Making conscious choices starts right there.

As for not taking gender into account when choosing books, I've done the exact opposite. For several years, I had a strict 50/50 regime, to "force" myself to read more books by women. Which opened my eyes to many fantastic writers I might have missed otherwise. This just to point out that part of the issue might lie with ourselves as readers as well - formed by society's norm as we are. In later years, I've come to accept an inbalance again, due to more men on the TBR (which is of course also not because of some natural law), but I always keept track and feel slightly rotten if it tilts too much in the wrong direction. In my experience, what really makes it difficult to keep the balance is the fact that i'm reading more GN:s now. The male dominance there is, sadly, massive.

I'm sure all those publisher do feel that they are perfectly equitable in their actions. But we prefer what we're familiar with and what best reflects us. It's not that the submissions by female writers aren't of the same quality as those of male writers. And it's difficult to recognize one's own privilege.

"And it's difficult to recognize one's own privilege." Yes this, very much so.

@180/362 I think this misunderstanding of feminism is still very much in place with a tendency to praise the token strong female character and call it feminism i.e. a character that is "one of the boys" is great unlike all those awful girlie girls. Its an easy fantasy to buy as its the opposite from the old fashioned heroine.. but really its still buying into sexism in that the girl is greater because she seen to have more "masculine" traits. Hmm I not sure I am explaining that right.. lets just say in summary stereotyping is wrong. :)

(we seem to be taking over your thread Katie!)

@364, great review btw

LOL - I'm enjoying the debate, so don't apologize for taking over the thread. You're not. Claire - yes, that's part of the issue. In Battle of the Sexes, Larbalestier classified some of the female characters in early SF as "honorary men," especially the rare female scientist. So a female character that acts just like a man isn't really a female character. That's some variation on tokenism - and leads to that form of prejudice that goes like this. "I don't like stick your favorite group here, but this particular member of that group is okay.

Anders - good for you. That's part of why I like doing the category challenge. It forces me to broaden my reading and to expose myself to new authors from groups I may not always be familiar with. If everyone were as careful about what they chose to read and what they chose to share with there children as you are, the world would be a much better place.

Ridgeway - I'm sure you're right. In their minds they'll publish whatever they receive that they think they can sell. It isn't a gender issue at all to most of them. Gordon Van Gelder got accused of gender bias in his SF magazine a few years back and a male writer married to a female writer put together a day where GvG would be "bombed" by submissions by women because GvG had said that his magazine's composition reflected the submissions he received and that he had published stories from several prominent women writers (which he has, but they don't make up even close to 50% of his writers). The women responded with "we don't send our stuff to you because we know you won't take it." Ugly little flame war, and I'm not sure it accomplished much. & in GvG's defense, from what I've heard he isn't a paid editor - which means he's put a lot of time and probably a lot of money into keeping his magazine afloat, in which case, I guess he can publish what he wants to read. I just wish there were more magazines like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet to compete for his readers. As for the bomb, most of my friends chuckled about it but also thought it wasn't the best way to convince GvG to publish more women. We sent in submissions but not anywhere near the day and month of the "bomb." We viewed the "bomb" as antagonistic. If you're going to use violent terminology such as "bomb," aren't you setting him up to feel attacked? That's what people do with bombs. They attack other people.

Just catching up on your thread Katie. Enjoying the conversation, though I have nothing to add.

@372 Good to see you Violet! I think we've hit so many points, it's hard to add anything.

#35 Finished #35 in the YA fantasy category. Changeover by Margaret Mahy. I've collected Mahy's books for awhile. She's not as known as she should be in the US, but I'm sure everyone in NZ has read her books. I'm not sure what to say about this book. It wasn't a 5 star read for me, and I expected it to be. Call me spoiled. It was a solid 4 star though, and since we've been talking about gender rolls, I was interested in her depiction of "Sorry" Sorenson Carlisle - "witch" (not warlock) who was unwanted by his family (mother and grandmother) because he was born male and they needed a female to complete the triad Mother, Maiden, Crone. Sorry is a mess. He's cold, crude, sometimes bordering on cruel. He has a naked pin-up girl in his room, next to the picture of his crush and near his collection of romance novels - cheap paperback romances. The novel predates Fabio's career, but you get the idea. Alas poor Sorry isn't sure if he's the hero or the villain in the romance, and Alex Day probably hadn't been born yet so Alex wasn't able to give Sorry his advice (that in this case refers to Twilight) "Guys, don't get dating tips from this book. Your girlfriend will not think it is cool if you break into her house to get her car keys so you can pick her up in her own car. Don't do it."

Sorry isn't the main character. The story is about Laura and her brother who is being consumed by a something that should've been dead long, long ago. Sorry is along for the ride - literally - since he's the one that owns the Vespa.

Nice review of Changeover Katie. I pretty much skipped children/young adult fiction when I was that age so Mahy is someone I still need to get to.

@369/371 I hate antagonism too but sometimes it hard not to get angry, politeness doesn't always get you anywhere. Anyway I think short story collections/magazines should go out of there way to publish a better gender mix & also more outside the white western world otherwise they should be shamed. Having said that of course I am going to have to improve my own reading habits! Right I am done, sorry.

#374 I went back and filled in a lot of the books I "should" have read as a kid too. Favorite Mahy is The Chewing-gum Rescue with Florence, Flora, Felicity, Fenella and Francesca

#375 Claire, no need to apologize! We're totally with you!

I do believe that there is general agreement. Also in regards to publishing more outside of our Western English-speaking box.

Oh yes! When Nnedi Okorafor was shopping around her YA African magic based fantasy Zahrah the Windseeker, she kept getting rejections saying we like this but we don't know how to market it. There isn't anything like it out there. - I thought publishers wanted stuff that wasn't like anything else out there? There's all sorts of bias in the publishing industry. & btw, her name is pronounced kind of like Endi. I think there's also a bias against people who have names that look hard to say. ;)

I was going to mention Zahrah the Windseeker as it is on my list to read this month. I admit I bought it over a year ago and should have read it before this.

I also like the novels by Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age and The Good Muslim and I am eagerly waiting for the third book in this trilogy which is set in Bangladesh.

I'll have to look into Tahmima Anam. I haven't even heard of her, and I always like hearing about new-to-me authors. Zozette, I hope you like Zahrah. I've been a lurker with the Carl Brandon Society - Nnedi is active with them - and I've met her a couple times at conventions. She's so sweet, so I'm real happy Zahrah the Windseeker finally made it into print and has managed to stay in print. Yeah her! And yes, it's unique and a voice we don't often hear. I'll be interested in seeing your comments once you get to it.

There's been some discussion on the women in fantasy debate over at the Science Fiction Fans group recently. I just thought that pointing people in the direction of this comment by Janny Wurts was worthwhile. It describes her own experience of being a genre author.

She's right. And awesome.

>381 AHS-Wolfy: - thanks for pointing that out, interesting discussion

let's not even start on the subject of genre bias though - how a lot of people look down at genre writers...

Interesting post and thread there - thanks for linking!

Wow thanks for linking, scary. Maybe we should have a SF & F women authors reading month or something.

Wow Dave! Thanks for that link. That's kind of depressing. Claire, I think you've got a great idea - a women in SF&F month. That's certainly something the 75ers would go for if there aren't enough people in the Category challenge interested.

& Pete, oh so right on the genre bias. Terry Pratchett has a snotty little essay (snotty but funny) about the difference between fantasy and magical realism. His definition of magical realism? A fantasy written by an author with a PHD. - I disagree - that wasn't the original intent of the term "magical realism" - but he has a point. It is becoming a euphemism for fantasy because fantasy isn't a respected genre.

Gosh, magic realism sure covers a wide swath. There's the South American variety, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the romantic strain, like Sarah Addison Allen and Joanne Harris and now the fantastical sort.

Why isn't fantasy respected? Sure, there's a lot of bilge water, but also Tolkein and Guy Gavriel Kay. Science fiction has vast acres of pulp!

>381 AHS-Wolfy: That's a great post, thanks for the link.

>386 cammykitty: I think the difference between fantasy and magic realism is hazy at best - I'd say that fantasy takes place in a created world whereas magic realism takes place in our world - although thats not as clear cut as it sounds. Gene Wolf apparently said that magic realism is fantasy written by people who's first language is Spanish ;-)

I put a note in the group reads reads thread about a SF & F women author month.. or just a women author month. If anyone is interested respond over there and I will set up a thread.

I read very little science fiction or fantasy, but I'd be in for a month where I only read books by women.

I use an extremely strict definition of Magical Realism. Magical Realism is an outgrowth of Catholicism and the belief of miracles - The Stone Raft being an extreme example of Magical Realism. Garcia Marquez would be an example of Magical Realism - he has characters being assumed into heaven while hanging out the laundry to dry. Which doesn't mean Magical Realism has to allude directly to religion. Like Water for Chocolate is magical realism, but it isn't clearly religious. However, the emotions being expressed in the food is handled like a simple miracle created by the purity and depth of our character's suffering and joy. Of course Magical Realism has influenced a lot of fiction writers, fantasy, Latino or other, but it IMHO isn't Magical Realism unless it has an element of spirituality and an assumption that strange things happen if God so chooses. Alice Hoffman is not Magical Realism from what little I've read of hers. She's heavily influenced by it, but hers are more like odd little tweaks to reality rather than miracles or the inexplicable except to God.

Carlos Fuentes' Aura? I'm sure some people have called Aura Magical Realism, and yes there are lots of elements of Catholicism in it - but I'd call that one straight up horror. Awesome horror! Why do I make the distinction? One, he follows the literary conventions of the Gothic Horror Writers like Blackwood and Le Fanu. Two, what he describes is unnatural, an abomination, more from the devil than from God.

As for fantasy, science fiction etc being looked down on, they are "commercial" and not academic. Mysteries, westerns and romances are also looked down on. I see this prejudice as coming for centuries from academia and is based on the assumption that genre works do not attempt to explore the big questions about life. & yes, most genre fiction isn't terribly ambitious, but some of it is. On the flip side, not all literary writing is successful, although it does tend to be ambitious. IMHO, I consider literary to be another genre. You can find spectacular works in any genre, and you can find spectacular failures in any genre.

& speaking of spectacular failures, can I say I love BookMooch? Someone has already said they want my button-ripping mystery, Black Irish. I hope he's not looking for a lot of reality in his mysteries. ;)

Thanks everyone for stopping by! Claire, thanks for getting the women authors month rolling.

No problem.. month chosen is June so please come and put your name down :)

Interesting I was just reading an article in the Guardian about the New York Review Books concentrating on literary fiction as a genre... I am personally not sure I like it, I hate pigeon-holing books. Although I think I understand the point that literary fiction is more to do with what the writers is trying to achieve than the story they tell I don't think being literature stops them belonging to other genres like Fantasy.

So of course articles like this one below tend to make my blood boil: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/its-genre-fiction-not-that-t...

I selectively quote:
Genre, served straight up, has its limitations, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
And


Oh I now also want to throw is this piece by Nick Harkaway on progressive fiction.. because I have this issue with a lot of more mainstream fiction http://www.nickharkaway.com/2013/02/progressive-fiction-and-the-kitschies/

and please top having such interesting discussions :)

->392 cammykitty:
I was hesitant about putting that book on Bookmooch since I don't want to inflict it on anyone, but who am I to judge. - if someone wants it, they can certainly have it! :)

>393 clfisha:: Wonderful post by Harkaway! Now I want to read The Gone-Away World :)

Hey, if a BookMoocher wants it, who are you to deny them. And then get something you'll like a little more.

#394 Eva, I'm with Ridgeway. If he wants it, it's his. I'd prefer him to save his precious book dollars for another book. & who knows, perhaps he's read all the amusing reviews of the book and is just dying to see if it is as bad as we say? Or perhaps he's doing a thesis on the misrepresentation of the Irish in modern fiction.

Claire, so sorry for the interesting discussions. ;) I don't know if we can stop. & thanks for those links. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the Newyorker piece:

Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, and Neil Gaiman... are forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century.” Huh? I didn't know any of this was hermetically sealed? After all Dickens wrote a ghost story for profit and it's been canonized as a literary masterpiece for quite some time.

All the Pretty Horses” is no more a western than “1984” is science fiction. Haven't read AtPH, but 1984? Isn't it science fiction? Just because the future date is no longer in the future doesn't change it's genre, right?

Writers who want to understand why the heart has reasons that reason cannot know are not going to write horror tales or police procedurals. ??? I thought that was a common horror trope?

Anyway Claire, thanks for some good snarkbait, and of course thanks for the Harkaway. I needed something to cleanse my palate after reading the first article.

& yes Rabbit, I've had The Gone-Away World on the TBR for awhile. Small group read anyone?

Hey no problem :) I think they may need to reread their own article and get some perspective.

I desperately need to reread Gone-Away World so I might be in for that :) its a good one for a group read you may need support to carry you through the 1st bit

>397 cammykitty: Just gently reminding the bloke from NewYorker that most of the oldest pieces of literature known to mankind are fantasy. Gilgamesh. Odyssey. Monkey King. Beowulf... The monster that needs to be overcome is at the core of storytelling itself. No Hamlet without a ghost. No midsummer night's dream withour faeries.

Seems to me this bloke is defining SF&F as "every exemple of using magic/supernatural/speculative elements that isn't working for me".

I'm all up for reading all females in june. And will have an all woman SF&F category for my 2014 challenge for sure.

I'm also up for group reading The gone-away world. Not in june though :)

Anders, great gentle reminder. Hadn't thought about how old fantasy really is.

Claire, good to know the first bit of Gone-Away World is perhaps a bit complicated.

& yes, I'm looking forward to these various reads!

I think it's more of a brilliant but aimless start. A lot of bad reviews seem to come from people who haven't finished it. Of course if the style is not for you don't wade onwards :)

Nice reminder Anders! I think I will have a category too :)

edited to make more sense.. I blame my phone not myself :)

@401 Yes, if the style is not for you don't wade onwards but unless it's an ER novel, if it's so bad I don't finish it, I don't review or rate it either. Sometimes "bad" writing has a purpose, as in The Demon's Lexicon. It's told by someone who struggles with language, but that isn't something the writer wants to reveal right away, so at first the writing style seems artless instead of purposely simple. If the "bad" writing has a purpose, you often don't know it until the bitter end.

>399 GingerbreadMan: - I made the same points on the category question thread - seems we're on the same wavelength :-)

the quote of 1984 not being science fiction was the one that made me go WTF!

a re-read of the gone away world you say? well why not I'd be interested in seeing how it holds up to a re-read after loving it so much first time round...

>402 cammykitty: - as Claire says it all seems a bit aimless at the beginning of the book but it's well worth sticking with, its by no means "bad" writing though

Hi Pete - Glad to know Gone Away World isn't bad writing, even if it doesn't get straight to the point. Diving right into the action is becoming almost a genre requirement now, kind of like how murder mysteries now tend to start with the "epilogue" where the first victim gets killed. Glad some writers are ignoring the trend.

& so happy that other people said WTF over 1984 too. It practically created a genre of science fiction, man against the economic/political machine. But I will say this. 1984 did come out of Orwell's experience with the Spanish Civil War, and when I was reading Argentinian short stories about the Dirty War, at first I thought I was reading Orwellian science fiction before I realized they were depicting the reality of Argentina at that time. Yikes.

You are now making me wan to go read those short stories!

They are super rare - worth reading if you can find them. They were in a book called Prospero's Mirror: A Translators' Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction edited by Ilan Stavans. It was a translators' showcase and a fundraiser for the PEN awards in the US. For me, it underlined the fact that we use science fiction to discuss reality, especially reality that is too raw to talk about directly.

OK am putting that one on the WL then, with the understanding I may have to work to track it down... thanks!

The best SF is speculative or a commentary of reality

Good luck! You never know. Sometimes rare books have a will of their own and jump into a reader's hands.

well there are some 2nd hand ones in the States that the P&P costs more than the book. Or its £50+ to buy new!

one of my friends on facebook posted this link http://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/46742.html and it made me think of the discussion above so thought I'd share it

@409 I'm surprised you can by it new but £50+ sounds steep. I'm not sure it's worth that. There are some great stories in it, but it isn't a to-die-for collection.

Great link Pete!!! Thanks! Definitely what we've been discussing.

Great discussion!

#39 - taking up spots in both group reads and classics, weighing in at 1252 pages and 5 stars, The Count of Monte Cristo. I power-read the final 200 pages last night, which made it a bit hard to get Sage to his 8:30 AM grooming appointment, but I did.

All I can say is Wow - he really wrote that for publication in installments? Torture to the readers - and how could Dumas plot that well if he was writing as he went? I loved it, except for the last chapter - I started hearing a pop song in the background. Anyone remember the group Badfinger? Lead singer killed himself. I know, I know, there are a lot of lead singers that kill themselves. I was hearing Badfinger last night around midnight as I finished the Count.

Yay for your power read of The Count, Katie! Every time I read it I find something new to marvel over.... which is why it is one of my all time favorite books!

It's totally worthy of being an all time favorite book. I'll forgive it for the little bit of what passed for romantic back in the 1800s that was in the last chapter. ;) The rest made up for that.

I am really enjoying The Count of Monte Cristo as well. I have only reached Chapter 40 so far, so I will probably not finish it until next month, but it's a wonderful story.

I've finished Monte Cristo as well - such a page-turner it turned out to be! Seriously, if I was reading it in installments, I'd be sitting on the publisher's doorstep whenever a new part was coming out! :)

Ok, I know that we have The Count of Monte Cristo on the Kindle becuase the hubby said that he listened to it and that was the only way he would have made it through the whole thing. . . .hmmm maybe if my Kindle fits in my fanny pack I can listen to it while I am walking. That should allow me to really get in a good l-o-n-g walk!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

A 50-hour (or so) walk will take you quite far! :)

Agreed!

Di, that would be a walk-till-you-drop! Evil idea, unless you're in Sweden for footrally or whatever it was called. In which case, it might keep you ahead of the porta-potty. ;)

yes, the Count is awesome and I feel really sorry for my ER novel that has to follow it. It can't win by comparison.

#40 The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich. We read this at school with the kids. Most of them loved it. It was really fun watching them react to "the big reveal" in the last chapter. Even the boys liked it.

I liked it, but not as much as the kids did. The illustrations, which Erdrich drew, were fantastic. The history (depiction of Ojibwe life) was accurate, and relevant to the kids since we live in Minnesota and do have a few Ojibwe kids in the school. I think I would've enjoyed it more if I didn't know anything at all about Louise Erdrich. Knowing about Michael Dorris and the events around his death make me uneasy and I found it colored the way I interpreted the book. I kept thinking Pinch had fetal alcohol syndrome etc etc... which is ridiculous. It was just a simple story about one year in an Ojibwe family's life. No hidden agenda.

#41 Sigh. It's never good to be an ER novel being read on the heels of The Count of Monte Cristo. Wolfhound Century was a big disappointment. Confusing, contorted with great Russian folkmonsters and tons of violence. However, the violence was a bit much for me, even though I know it came nowhere near the violence of revolutionary Russia. Thing is, I was lukewarm about the characters and it seemed like the world had their choice between a terrible option and a questionable option.

#42 Vlad by Carlos Fuentes is a quick novela that fit in my Mexican Authors section - and of course will help me get reading for my panel on Mexican F&SF. This one is straight-up horror. No way of politely saying it is magical realism. After all, it's named after Vlad the Impaler and one chapter describes him in all of his historic detail, which honestly is far more gruesome than the whole Vampire myth. Aura is still my favorite, but this Vlad who enters Mexico City via an old man who has weathered politics through several presidencies, is a great edition to Dracula literature.