literature

Literary Terms I Like

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I started making this list several years ago, when I was reading Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia straight through. I believe I got to the letter H before I got too busy and abandoned the project. That’s fantastic reference book, though.

Accismus
Irony involving insincere modesty

Aesthetic distance
A term that describes the ability to objectify experience in art and present it as independent from its maker.

Argus-eyed
Jealously watchful

Beatrice
Dante’s symbol of Spiritual inspiration

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Superhero Reading List

To my Amazon Wish List, I just added:
How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
by Daniel H. Wilson
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
by Max Brooks
Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book
by Robert Hamburger
The Government Manual for New Superheroes
by Jacob Sager Weinstein
The Action Hero’s Handbook
by David Borgenicht
The Action Heroine’s Handbook
by Jennifer Worick
How to Be a Superhero
by Barry Neville
The Batman Handbook: The Ultimate Training Manual
by Chuck Dixon
How to Be a Villain
by Neil Zawacki
How to Rule the World: A Handbook for the Aspiring Dictator
by Andre de Guillaume
The Science of Supervillains
by Lois H. Gresh
So, I should be in good shape. yep.

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100 Best First Lines from Novels

According to the American Book Review:
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

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Best Lesbian Erotica 2006 (Best Lesbian Erotica Series)

Best Lesbian Erotica 2006 (Best Lesbian Erotica Series)
by Tristan Taormino, Eileen Myles

This was better than most lesbian erotica books I’ve read, I have to say. I’m normally not a huge fan of the genre because it’s often so badly written that I can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to go for the ride. (So to speak.) I just get irritated by what I’m reading. Most of these stories were better written, or at least well edited enough not to tick me off before I could grok what the story was.

That said, there’s a huge issue of personal taste involved when it comes to the stories in this book, and to the genre in general. I’m really not wired to find the idea of sadomasochism/bondage/dominance appealing or intriguing. I’m not offended or grossed out or against it in any fashion. I fully support other people’s decisions to consensually tie each other up if they want to. But it’s not interesting to me, and I’d say roughly half these stories included it in some fashion or another. After awhile, I just skipped over them. I wish the genre were broken down further so that I could opt out of that particular flavor of short story.

I also have to admit that I’m not all that interested in the idea of gender role-playing or exploring masculine identities, or at least not to the extent that the stories in this book do. I know that these are ideas that the lesbian community is exploring and examining, especially as more transgender people start to recognize who they are and how they fit into society in general and the lesbian community in particular. But it’s also outside of my set of interests, and probably another way that I would break down the genre into categories so that I could opt out of skimming then skipping things that don’t interest me.

2019 update: Hellllooooo denial. I think there is some element of other people’s coming out process as trans masculine that is really put me off the idea of transitioning though. There was a lot of he-man macho posturing among trans men coming out that was uncomfortable and smacked of abuse.

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Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme

Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme
by Chris Roberts examines the history behind children’s nursery rhymes. Most children’s rhymes came from adult songs and poems that were handed down and altered over centuries, and most were expurgated for childrens ears in the Victorian age. Roberts traces many of them further back and examines various theories of their origins. Hearing the unexpurgated versions is interesting, and the book is an entertaining read, but is a bit light on sources and a bit long on speculation, with a few too many off-topic asides. Many of his explanations make sense, but a few too many of them seem to have the same set of explanations, or no clear reason why one theory would be preferred over another.

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A Feast For Crows: worth the wait

I finished up reading George R. R. Martin’s long-awaited fourth fantasy novel A Feast for Crows today. I’m dying to find out what happens next. The fifth book (A Dance of Dragons) in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series is due out sometime this year, and if it does drop (Martin is notorious for taking his time writing) I may have to break one of my New Year’s Resolutions and buy it.

Every review I’ve read criticizes the fact that this book was split in half; the next installment was originally planned as part of this book, and Martin reworked the story to separate out some storylines in order to tame an unwieldy volume. It was a wise decision; this half is large and complex and I can only imagine what a book twice this size would weigh, let alone how hard it would be to work through.

I mentioned when I picked up the book to read it that I had a hard time getting my bearings and recalling the “who, where and why” of the numerous story lines as they pick up from the first three books (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords). Wikipedia wasn’t quite enough to help me and I ended up re-reading sections of the previous book to refresh my memory.

That was a frustration, but worth the effort. The Song of Ice and Fire series follows hundreds of characters as they live in and fight over the fictional land of Westeros, and the intrigue and machinations of the various families fighting for control of the land is fascinating. Some character’s motives are pure, some are not; some visions and desires are far-seeing and some are not. The chapters move from one character to the next, and the villain you’re despising in one chapter is the narrator you identify with in another. Only you get a glimpse of the big picture, and even then Martin obscures much of it from view. But the part that you can see is pure poetry, and has made me one of Martin’s faithful if impatient fans.

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A Feast for Crows: starting the book

I started reading one of the books I bought with my Barnes and Noble gift cards, A Feast for Crows this week. It’s the fourth book in the fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin. I really enjoy this series because it turns many of the tired fantasy cliches upside down, or simply ignores them. There’s very little magic in the series, and what there is is subtle and in the background. There’s no “farmboy with royal lineage who discovers his personal journey to find the throne while battling a wicked magician who lives in far off mountains,” thank god. Wikipedia gives a better explanation than I could:

A Song of Ice and Fire is set in a fictitious world reminiscent of Europe in the Middle Ages, except for the fact that in this world, seasons can last as long as a decade. Driven by members of the Houses, great and small, the plot is recounted from the perspectives of more than ten main characters and takes place on the continents of Westeros and the eastern continent, the former being the locale of fierce power struggles between several aristocratic families after the death of king Robert Baratheon, who by lineage, marriage and personal relationships had united them all.

The model for the series was England’s Wars of the Roses, and the story follows several different richly-drawn characters on different sides of the struggle. The thing I found compelling was that I sympathized with characters on both sides of the war who would have been allies in other circumstances but who found themselves at odds due to family loyalties and conflicting religious beliefs.

A Feast for Crows is starting pretty slowly for me, because it begins by following some minor characters that I can’t quite remember from the previous books. The gap between the publication of the last novel and this one was large; I read A Storm of Swords in 2002 and am struggling to remember where the series left off. I read over Wikipedia’s summaries, though, and was able to get my bearings, so I have an idea of who and where everyone is.

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What I Read in 2005 (51 Titles)

I’m going to change around a bit how I record the books I’ve read. This coming year, I’ll log titles by doing a short blog entry about them, instead of doing a running list as I have in years past. I’m shifting my past lists of books read over into my blog, as well under the category of “Books I’ve Read.”

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