Have you read Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal? What are you waiting for?

This is a delightful read, a gentle story that manages simultaneously to be a page-turner. Exquisite language, and gorgeous character development, too (especially of the suitors–I was so delighted!) The library is demanding that I return the copy I just finished, but I’ll be adding this one to my personal bookshelf as soon as I can.

Go buy it now.

I have this little stack of books, see, that refuse to stay shelved for too long. Sometimes I try to tidy the apartment, to find the flat surfaces underneath the piles of books (I’m only half to blame for this–we both have an addiction), but within a few days this certain little stack always finds itself migrating back to the dining room table where I do most of my writing.

The stack changes depending on the project I’m working on, but lately for me it’s been all-novel, all-the-time. Here’s a little survey of the stack’s current makeup:

The Etched City by K. J. Bishop

I thought a friend recommended this book to me ages ago, and so I picked it up at the bookstore. It turns out that he’d recommended a different book entirely, but I am so incredibly happy I made that misunderstanding. The Etched City is a gorgeous book, full of beautifully descriptive passages that make my mouth water every time I read them. Whenever I get stuck for description in an urban scene, I think, “how would Bishop have written that?” and I flip to one of the many bookmarked passages for inspiration.

More Terrible Than Death by Robin Kirk

Robin Kirk’s book has taken decades of violent history in Colombia and turned it into a powerful, gripping narrative of corruption, massacres, drug lords and hope. Her book is one of the most lyrical books on South America that I’ve read, and she does an amazing job at focusing the reader on the big picture, then driving it home with visceral interviews and portrayals of the people she met. I’ve devoured this book cover to cover many times since I first read it in college. You should, too.

Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan

Nabhan is one of the best writers about local food, traditional agriculture and sustainability in the American Southwest. He’s based out of Tucson, AZ, and as the environment of my novel is based on the Sonora desert, whenever I find myself staring out at the drizzly Seattle cityscape with my photos and research notes in front of me, trying to recapture the magic of the desert, I search through one of his books.

(Total NPR nerd alert, but check out this interview he did a few months ago on KUOW about native Northwest foods.)

Honorable mentions

Those three books are dogeared and marked up, but I have plenty of other books I turn to in my time of need. If I’m looking for inspiration for making my dialog better, lately I’ve been turning to Tana French and to Stacia Kane’s Downside books. For historical inspiration, I bring out Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger, Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara, Violent Politics by William R. Polk (definitely check that one out), and of course, anything by Eduardo Galeano.

What are you reading?

It’s been ages since I’ve read any paranormal stuff, but when I saw the cover of Changeless by Gail Carriger I was drawn to read the back cover, and, as I mentioned, when I saw what was written on the back I simply had to buy it, even though it was the second in a series, even though it was about werewolves (which I really have nothing against, but rarely read), even though I hadn’t bought a book in over a year. (By the way, that purchase initiated a shameful amount of time and money spent in bookstores over the past few weeks, both physical and online. Oops.)

I can’t promise much by way of review here because I just flew through the book, mostly while having after-shift beers one night at work. So, I guess in addition to initiating my book spending spree, I can also blame Changeless for hindering my progress in getting to know my new coworkers. Every time one of them would stop by the bar and say hi, I’d make the bare minimum of smalltalk, just itching to get back to reading. She has a parasol that shoots darts, for goodness sake!

The Story

Alexia Maccon, the Lady Woolsey, is a preternatural. If she touches creatures like vampires and werewolves they turn human. She’s married to a large and lusty Scottish werewolf lord, and spends her time advising Queen Victoria on matters of the supernatural. When her husband leaves for Scotland, Alexia sets off after him, armed with her trusty parasol and plagued by a pair of Victorian ladies, in the company of the mysterious but sexy cross-dressing French inventor Madame Lefoux.

This book is full of lovable and strongly drawn characters with quick wits and good conversation. Add a good dose of humor, manners, and steampunk, and you’ll understand why I’m gushing.

Carriger has a lovely way with words, and a knack for verbing nouns that makes her prose, I don’t know, sparkle and skitter across the page like an adorable baby bunny, um, covered in glitter. It just makes you want to smile, is what I’m saying.

“Have a little nip of this, my dear,” [said sexy cross-dressing French inventor Madame Lefoux], “Calm your nerves.” She handed [the flask] to Ivy.

Ivy nipped, blinked a couple times, nipped again, and then graduated from frantic to loopy. “Why that burns all the way down!”

Although this was the second book in the series, it stood on its own just fine for me. Carriger managed to write a story that was self-contained without either a) over-explaining what happened in the first book for those of us who completely ignore proper order or b) making the book read incomprehensibly. I feel like I can read the first book without really any spoilers, and I can’t wait to do it. Next paycheck.

The only thing was, I can’t believe that Alexia didn’t get that Madame Lefoux was a lesbian even though Lefoux breathed it out of every pore, as well as making thinly-veiled allusions to her sexual preferences in every other conversation. Especially since Alexia is friends with the celebratedly gay vampire Lord Akeldama (another fantastic and delightful character who I can’t wait to read more about in books 1 and 3.).

Read this book now!

I first learned about Carol Emshwiller while perusing Small Beer Press’s catalog a few years back. The idea behind her novel The Mount (a young alien and his human mount, Charley, negotiate their master/slave/friend relationship) intrigued me, and when I read it I fell in love with her quirky-but-serious writing style. A month before we left for Peru, Small Beer Press had a $1 book sale. Yes, really.

Wait. Do you not also obsess about Small Beer Press? Everything they do is awesome. Check them out.

That said, I went nuts on their sale even though I was supposed to be saving money for Peru, and I ended up with a copy of Carmen Dog that I knew would go in storage until Rob and I got back from our Indefinite Peruvian Journey.

But now we’re back. And I read Carmen Dog

(There’s one paragraph about the end–I’ve marked it with a spoiler alert. Skip it if you don’t like that sort of thing).

Here’s where I talk about the book

Carmen Dog is a shortish book, a quick read that left me both entertained and vaguely disturbed. The idea behind it is that women have begun to change into creatures and vice versa. A whole spectrum of biases against women are revealed now that the line has blurred between “wife” and “pet.” Women, having always been a frighteningly opaque species, are now even more incomprehensible as their normal feminine whims merge with the urge to fly, to swim in the sea, to climb trees, to gnaw on human flesh.

Emshwiller rarely describes her characters, only giving wildly colorful descriptions that leave everything to the imagination. The whys and hows of the women’s transformations are never fully answered: on one page the women do things that only women could do, at other times that only animals could. Emshwiller doesn’t try to direct our imaginings, she merely puts a few hints out to entice.

The main character is Pooch, a well-bred and extremely loyal dog-turned-young-woman. She teeters on the edge of her new-found humanity: she enjoys the new responsibilities, artistic leanings and the elegant new hands which are a part of her new transformation, but she’s also been thrust into a world of malicious intention and conflicted feelings.

Pooch is loyal, as a dog should be. Her self-worth is found almost entirely in the eyes of the men she desires to serve well and unselfishly, to the detriment of her own aspirations. In a dog, this is admirable. In a young woman, Pooch’s slavish desire to prove herself to her master is extremely uncomfortable to read about. Emshwiller plays with this tension: after hearing that the master will come for her at the pound, Pooch reels:

But if she apologizes profusely enough and promises to work much harder, to get up very early, eat less, and not take even one little moment for herself or even one little penny ever again for such frivolities as flowers [...], perhaps in this way she can make it up to him or do penance of some sort. “Anything,” she will say to him, “I’ll do absolutely anything: lick your feet, walk one step behind your left heel…just let me stay and serve you and let me see the baby now and then if only from a distance [...].” She hopes that after she says all this and makes the promises, he’ll see that she’s worth keeping–a thought not uncommon to many creatures of her sex. (p. 16.)

Carmen Dog is a brutal critique of the dynamic of relationships between men and women, but Emshwiller doesn’t come across as having an agenda–she’s just created a strange little “what if?” world, then taken it and ran.

Pooch is the only female voice in the novel. Emshwiller gives us the perspective of the Master, of the Doctor, of the worried men at the Academy of Motherhood who try to find a way to rear children without the tainted influence of unstable women. The men, it turns out, are nearly all assholes. Women have become property, a thing to be controlled, and beneath Emshwiller’s lovely prose runs an unsettling current of sexual dominance and manipulation.

It was almost as though the men had at last found a world to their liking, in which they had even more control than before and in which relationships and responsibilities were less confining. After all, they merely involved dumb animals who were not worth consideration, politeness, time, effort, gifts. [...] To be fair, however, one must admit that a small percentage of the men are trying to help out as best they can, both in bringing reason to chaos and also in bringing a little happiness or, at the very least, some small comforts, to everyone’s lives–whether human or animal or half and half–inasmuch as such a thing may be possible. (p. 32.)

Upon fleeing her master’s house to protect the baby from its mother (who is rapidly becoming a snapping turtle), Pooch is thrown into a women-only pound where the female creatures are abused and, in one instance, sexually assaulted. She is then transferred to a basement research facility where the Doctor performs cruel experiments on the women. After losing her beautiful operatic singing voice as a result of his torture, Pooch escapes with the baby and navigates the streets of New York, penniless and defenseless. Eventually the women and their allies form a resistance to fight their marginalization.

[Spoiler alert] In the end, however, there’s a happily-ever-after moment that rings false. Pooch ends up with her dream man, who seems like a very nice sort (yay!), but that is presented in a “happy epilogue” with two other matches that left a sour taste in my mouth. Two of the main sadistic male characters we meet–the Doctor and the Opera Producer–have repeatedly expressed interest (obsession? love, we’re told) in two of Pooch’s friends. Since we never get inside the heads of Pooch’s friends, it’s hard to know whether Chloe (an ex-siamese) really wants to marry the Opera Producer after weeks of sexual slavery to him, or whether Phillip (an ex-kingsnake who turned out to be female) really wants to marry the Doctor after he tortured her. Emshwiller presents their unions as tidy “of course it ended that way” moments, without any of the biting commentary and analysis that she used throughout the rest of the book.

In the end, however, I loved Carmen Dog. If you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it to you.

On nostalgic childhood, except for that chapter about the serial killer

My year-after-college-graduation roommate was in love with Dandelion Wine. We had grown up together–she was my little sister’s age, and thus fell into the category of “annoying” while we were younger. After I went away to college and “re-met” her a few years later, I realized that I really dug her style. I still do. She’s one of the cuter things in the world.

I went through a long dry spell of reading materials during our six months in Peru, mainly because it was so hard to find anything in a book exchange that wasn’t written by Nora Roberts or Tom Clancy. So when we got into Portland to visit my awesome ex-roommate and her adorable 2-year-old, I found myself completely overwhelmed by her bookshelf.

I was looking for something to pass the evening, something pleasant, well-written, meaningful…. I was frozen by indecision when faced with such an array of great books that I’ve always wanted to read. My fingers lit on one, then another classic work of beauty and longing. I bit my lip, tormented by indecision.

I finally settled on a slim, well-loved copy of Dandelion Wine–partly because I knew how much my ex-roommate liked it, and partly because it looked short and I was a bit worried that my attention span had taken a blow. I settled down on the couch with a crocheted afghan pulled up around my neck, and began to read.

So I finally talk about the book here

I haven’t read any Bradbury since I forgot how to spell Fahrenheit 451 in high school. Dandelion Wine is not what I was expecting–a gently nostalgic look at childhood through the lens of Summertime.

Douglas Spaulding takes it upon himself to chronicle the rituals and revelations of summer, from the first pair of New Sneakers, to the loss of his best friend. It’s as though through the very attempt to capture his childhood on paper, however, he destroys its illusion. He realizes that friendships end, people die, and that important rituals cease to have any meaning.

The novel is lusciously written, touching, heartbreaking, haunting…. And then there’s the serial killer chapter that snuck up on me while I was innocently reading in bed. I expected another wistful tale of missed connections or angst-filled childhood revelation. Instead, I found myself suddenly immersed in a heart-pounding chase of terror, where you flee the most terrible thing you can think of, only to find it in the place you thought was the safest.

Did I have nightmares that night? Of course I did. It’s near page 121, if you want to time your bedtime reading around missing it (recommended).

In short, read this book. Carefully.