Comfort books

I spent most of November reading for work—I was invited to pitch a story idea for an anthology in another author’s world, but I hadn’t read any of the books in that world since, ooh, 1995-ish?* I had thirteen on hand, plus I got one out of the library, although no, I didn’t read them all. I dipped in and out, asked questions, and eventually wrote a fully formed idea. I also had a vague idea that had been niggling in the back of my head, so I went ahead and pitched that as well…

Yeah. You know which one they picked. But it’ll be more fun to write because I don’t really know what it’s all about!

But that’s not what I wanted to ramble about. There are a lot of things I want to ramble about, actually, as I ponder how the holiday season affects me: ritual, family, darkness and light, spirituality, death, snow/cold. A dozen different blog posts float through my head. Many are interconnected.

Most come back to story. Which doesn’t surprise me in the least.

My usual traditional holiday reading is The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Most years, I try to read all five books in the sequence, but that one is the most meaningful to me, set in a cold, snowy British winter. I remember finding these books in my school library; not sure if it was 8^th or 9^th grade. They built on Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander to solidify my fascination with Britain, especially Wales, and the deep magic there.

This year, though, I find myself drawn to other books. I’m not sure how to explain it except to call them comfort reading. Books that pull you down into the story and the characters and you’re there and they’re real, and it’s not so much that you can’t stop turning the pages as you’re not even aware of turning the pages. Magic, yes, but often a more subtle magic.

I moved my office upstairs at the beginning of the year, and as part of that created a wall of books (there are more bookcases on other walls, but one wall is all shelves), and in the process went through all of the fiction we have. I did get rid of a few things. I also found things I hadn’t really thought about, even though they were in a wall of bookshelves in my downstairs office, right there.

I’m reading Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin right now, because a few months ago I was staring at the shelves and it…called to me. I read at least the first chapter right there, as if under a spell. When I finished reading for work and looked around for the next book to read, that was the one I wanted. Not the 200+ books in my To Read bookcase in the upstairs landing, oh no. Tam Lin, dammit.

After that, I think it’ll be The Wood Wife by Terri Windling. I’ve been reading her blog for the past few months, so that seems…right.

 I’m not sure what I’ll choose after that. I find myself rejecting books I love as being “not right,” even as I can’t define what’s “right,” what’s “comfort.” Some, despite how I love them, are too dense. I don’t want dense or deep. (I don’t want fluff, either, really.) I just turned and stared at the shelves. Neverwhere (Gaiman), maybe? Kushner’s Swordspoint? (Why not both?)

I can’t quite put my finger on the common thread of these books. I can feel it, I can almost describe it, but then it slips away. Mythic fiction, maybe?

Do you have comfort books? What are they? What do they have in common, and why do you love them so?

--*Which is not to say the reading was arduous—I enjoy this author immensely. It’s just that if I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have necessarily binged on this author for a month straight.

Recommending Reading: Nostalgia Edition

I am an unabashed child of the 80s. I turned 14 in 1980, although I have sort of a weird concept of pop culture from late 1985 on – I lived at home my freshman year (mid-1984 to fall 1985), and didn’t have a TV in college. Plus I lived in England for six months in 1987, which cemented my love of musical artists like Kate Bush and Marillion.

I grew up in a small-ish town in upstate NY (real upstate, as in 3 hours north of Albany and half an hour south of the Canadian border), and we didn’t get MTV for the first few years of its existence. My best friend, who lived in Virginia and with whom I exchanged handwritten 40-page letters every two weeks (this was before the Internet, kids), babbled about this new channel, and I was all “Huh? Whut?” I watched Friday Night Videos and at least one Canadian video show, and on Friday nights when I was flipping between stations, I knew what the hot video was because they were all playing the same one. Like the night I saw Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” three times…

I remember discovering MTV one afternoon, probably 1984 or 1985, and sitting there with my mouth open, sure that it was some kind of promo thing on our cable. I was reluctantly dragged away for supper (my parents were big on the supper-as-a-family thing) and mentioned it at the table, and my mother casually said, as if it weren’t a big deal, “Oh yes, we’ve had that for a week.”

(Mom, don’t read this paragraph.) I remember when I had a 2-week-long Spring Break party my first year of college (again, I lived at home that year) while my parents were away, and we had MTV on All. The. Time. (Okay, except when we tried to watch Krull, but kept getting distracted and rewinding because we had missed the point. As if there were a point to Krull. Our drunken selves were convinced there must be.)

I could go on about my own memories of that time, but that’s not my point here. (If you want more stories, just ask. I have a lot. I will endeavor to make them as amusing as they were at the time.) My point is that MTV had a formative effect on my life, as it did for many people around my age.

Which is one of the reasons why this book is one of my recommended reads: I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum).

A good friend had rec’d it to me, and eventually it burped up in my Amazon shopping cart “hold for later” or whatever it’s called. I dump stuff in there and when I want to order a certain item and need to bump my order up to $25 so I can get free shipping, I peruse that list. And eventually I Want My MTV burped.

I’m sorry I waited so long.

As an independent businessperson, it’s smart for me to read about business in the area of arts. So the early chapters of the book were fascinating in terms of how the guys took the idea from concept to reality, against all odds.

And then the book settled in to lots of fun stories about artists and videos and drugs and sex and music, and the hardest part was not reading every other story out loud to Ken.

The book is chopped up into small paragraphs of reminiscences by many people, so it was easy to dip in and out. I mostly read chunks of it while I was eating breakfast.

While I was enjoying it, I got an email from another friend letting me know that for my birthday, she was giving me VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave (Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, with Gavin Edwards). Since it wouldn’t be on sale until after my birthday, she was giving me a heads-up.

VJ was the perfect counterpoint to I Want My MTV­ – an inside look at the same subject in the words of the first five VJ’s (JJ Jackson passed away a few years ago, but some of his interviews were transcribed). The first book covered everything and talked to hundreds of people, whereas this one was more focused on what the work environment was like. Fascinating stuff again on both levels, business and entertainment.

If you still own your parachute shirts or wistfully miss peplum jackets, or if your CD collection sputters after 1989, then I wholeheartedly recommend these books.

A project of my heart

I wear a lot of hats, professionally: writer, publisher, copyeditor, developmental editor, proofreader, designer. While the writing I do is pure joy (even when I'm tearing my hair out), it's not often I get to use my skills on a project that is as near and dear to my heart as this one.

Before my aunt passed away in 2005, she wrote a book about her son, my cousin Rick, who was in a terrible motorcycle accident when he was a teenager (I was only 4 at the time and wasn't aware of everything 'til later), and his amazing life as they dealt and triumphed over his traumatic brain injury. She was unable to find a publisher for the book before she died, and my cousin Pam, Rick's sister, took up the mantle.

I'm proud beyond belief to be able to say that my publishing company, Soul's Road Press, can now announce the publication of this book. I did the editing and design, and a dear colleague proofread the book for free, and she and a colleague of hers assisted me with some of the computer stuff. (I can't thank them enough, I really can't.)

This book…it's not something I would normally pick up and read, and so I feel truly fortunate that I was a part of the publishing process for it, because it's amazing. I didn't know about everything that happened, especially in the early years. (Plus, as a kid, I just accepted my cousin for who he was, and thus never really saw how hard it was for him. He was my cousin who taught me to shoot pool, who was a fantastic photographer. So what if he sometimes struggled to find the right words? We've got time.) It moved me to tears, and I think that wasn't just because I'm related to these phenomenal people.

Thus, this book is also one of my Recommended Reads.

Without further ado, may I present...

No Horns, No Trumpets:
A Memoir of Brain Injury and Recovery
Alice D. Clark & Richard W. Clark

Once a normal day is lost, will it ever return? A reckless driver runs a stop sign and plows into a motorcycle. On that beautiful October day, a young mother’s life shatters as doctors tell her that her 15-year-old son will never come out of the coma. But when he does, the doctors are at a loss. No treatment plans for traumatic brain injury exist in 1970. But Alice Clark refuses to take no for an answer – knowing her son is a fighter, she brings Rick home. As his greatest champion, she uses her head and heart to guide him from sitting in a wheelchair to downhill skiing, from being unable to speak to writing and editing a monthly newsletter. In No Horns, No Trumpets, Alice and Rick tell their story of setbacks and successes with humor, honesty, and pathos.

About the Authors

Alice Clark tackled the challenge of her son Rick’s brain injury in 1970 and became an early advocate for traumatic brain injury. Active in several TBI organizations in Florida and New York, she and Rick traveled across New York and gave speeches on behalf of Think First, a program aimed at educating teenagers about brain injuries. For nearly thirty years, Alice continued to learn about TBI from personal experience, trial and error, and from the many professionals she met before she began work on No Horns, No Trumpets. She enjoyed golf, horseback riding, scuba diving, and downhill skiing, and took classes in painting, photography, bartending, and flying. She became a stockbroker in her 50s. Her uncanny ability to always see light at the end of the darkest of tunnels was a gift she generously shared with others.

Traumatic brain injury survivor Rick Clark’s competitive drive and desire to succeed thrived even after his motorcycle accident. Under his mother’s guidance, he finally found his niche when he began writing stories about his experiences with brain injury, and writing became his career. As the founding and current editor of the North Country Regional Traumatic Brain Injury Center’s newsletter, Sudden Impact, Rick writes heartfelt stories focusing on the positive aspects of life with brain injury and always extolling the many virtues of positive thinking. He enjoys public speaking and one day hopes to compile an collection of his stories.

Available in print and in a variety of electronic formats:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords

Recommended Reading: The Demon Lover, the Newsflesh trilogy, and Tamsin

The DemonLover, Juliet Dark. Juliet Dark is a pseudonym for literary mystery author Carol Goodman, whose books I’ve raved about here before. By “literary mystery” I really mean rich gothics: stories that involve the heroine’s physical and sometimes emotional isolation, evocatively described settings, a sense of dread or foreboding, and often a past mystery that needs to be solved. Yum. The Dark pseudonym is for her new trilogy (and who knows, maybe more?), which are billed as paranormal romance, but they aren’t, not really. Demon Lover is paranormal, absolutely, but not really a “romance” in the genre sense, in part because it’s a trilogy.

Anyway, I still loved it. It’s got an incubus and a witch and a Victorian house and a slightly creepy college in “upstate New York” (which is in quotes because it’s not really upstate upstate), and a heroine whose “lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature” (back cover copy). Oddly, the book I’ve just started writing has some of those elements. Or maybe not so oddly, because I love those elements, and gothics, and paranormals, and romances. If you do, too, you might very well like this book.

Blackout, Mira Grant. I’ve been remiss in keeping up with these posts, so I don’t think I’ve actually recommended Feed and Deadline, the first two books in this trilogy. Let’s just make this about all of them, shall we?

Mira Grant is the pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, whose urban fantasies I’ve rave about there before. (Apparently it’s been my month for pseudonymous author I rave about.) She went with a pseudonym because these are more science fiction/horror. They’re about biologically created zombies.

If you’d told me I’d willingly read a zombie book, much less enjoy it, I’d’ve laughed. I really don’t get the whole zombie phenomenon. (Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with it—I’m simply more partial to ghosts, witches, and fairies than I am zombies, vampires, and werecreatures. If it’s a good book about any of those things, I’ll give it a try.)

These are good books. Give them a try. Grant/McGuire’s magical power is the ability to create characters that really feel like real people. She also creates believable situations—she researched the epidemiology of how the zombie virus works—and talk about page-turning cliffhangers, hoo boy. If you’re up all night reading these books, don’t blame me. But read them.

Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle. I first read Tamsin when we lived in Wales, and I reread it earlier this year in preparation for Phoenix Comicon, where Beagle was a guest. I’d intended to have him autograph it, but instead I caved and bought the deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray edition of The Last Unicorn. (What can I say? I’m weak when I get all fangirly.)

I’d forgotten how good Tamsin is, which was in some ways nice because it felt like I was experiencing all the wonder for the first time. Although the protagonist, Jenny, starts the book at age fourteen, it’s not a YA book (although it could certainly be read by YA readers). Jenny’s perfectly content with her life in NYC with her mother, her cat Mister Cat, her friends, etc. Then her mother has to go and fall in love with a British guy who hauls them off to a farm in Dorset, along with his two sons. When I was growing up, this would have sounded like pure freaking heaven (and it still does, in many ways!), but not so much to Jenny. Jenny’s miserable but not bitchy; she’s unhappy but not unhelpful. She has a fantastic voice, too, and as she teeters on the brink of womanhood, she finds both the wondrous magic and terrible evil the world contains.

Beagle is a master storyteller, and Tamsin is just about perfect. If it weren’t for the tottering piles of books in my To Read bookcase, I’d be likely to pick this back up and reread it right now….

Recommended Reading: Discount Armageddon

Okay, so I’ve given up on the idea of a regular Recommended Reading list. I’m just not wired to do regular posts. What you’re going to get is random Recommended Reading suggestions. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the bookstore….

My worshipfulness of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series is well documented, and I believe I’ve even admitted my love of her (as Mira Grant) zombie books—which I bought because I adore her writing, even though zombies as a genre fail to capture my interest, so kudos to McGuire/Grant for confirming my belief that if I like an author, I’ll follow her/him to pretty much any genre. (See, e.g., Barbara Hambly.)

Now Seanan has a new series out, called the InCryptid, the first of which is Discount Armageddon. Urban fantasy again, and from the title, I’m sure you can guess the tone. It has funny bits. Really funny bits.

The premise is that all those mythical creatures that cryptozoologists believe in—from bogeymen to sasquatch, and chupacabra to tooth fairies (nasty creatures that they are)—are real, and the protagonist, Verity Price, comes from a family of folks who study them. Except Verity really wants to be a ballroom dancer. The Price family split with the Covenant of St. George generations ago, because the Covenant is all about the wholesale slaughter of monsters.

My favorite part of the book is, hands down, the Aeslin Mice, who are these sentient mice who have huge elaborate worship rituals regarding, among other things, the Price family. They have celebrations for everything. Like, to mark the union of the Noisy Priestess to the God of All Things That It Is Almost Certainly Better Not To Be Aware Of, or my personal favorite so far, the Holy Feast of I Swear, Daddy, I’ll Kiss the Next Man That Walks Through That Door.

If that doesn’t make you want to read Discount Armageddon, then I don’t know what would.

Recommended Reading, November & December 2010

Recommended Reading, November

The Freelancer’s Survivor Guide, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Ever considered ditching your day job and working for yourself, in any capacity (not just writing)? Then you have to read this book. Rusch has been freelancing for years, she’s made all the mistakes and learned from them, and in this book she tells you what they were, what she learned, and how she came out the other side. She posted each chapter on her blog, and in fact wrote chapters she never even intended to based on comments and questions she received. You can still read it there, or you can buy it as a print book or ebook. Believe me, it’s worth every penny!

Except the Queen, Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder. Devoted faerie sisters Meteora and Serana anger their Queen and are banished to the mortal realm. Now middle-aged (with all its attendant creaks and pains and the lack of the breathtaking beauty of youth and fey) and, worse, separated from each other, they struggle to survive in an alien world and find each other again. But the humans they befriend make it clear that there’s far more going on than a simple banishment…. I’d read the novella version of this in Marvin Kayes Fair Folk anthology, which won a World Fantasy Award (and which itself is worth reading for Tanith Lee’s contribution) and was thrilled to discover they’d expanded it to novel form.

Recommended Reading, December

December was a roundly crappy month for me, so that may have colored how I felt about what I read that month. Maybe some books were better than I realized, but I wasn’t in the right headspace. I did read several good things, but ones I didn’t think were great enough to mention here. So I only have one…

Maybe This Time, Jennifer Crusie. I have been vibrating with excitement for this book ever since Crusie started talking about it on her blog. It’s her modern take on The Turn of the Screw, which a stronger heroine and Crusie’s funny, breathless style of prose. Which is not to say it’s not damn creepy in places, because it is, and there were times when I wished Ken were home while I was reading it…. Seriously, you’ve got ghosts, romance, a crumbling castle transported to the Midwest more than a century ago, and the usual assortment of secondary characters both hilarious and disturbing. What’s not to love?

Recommended Reading, September & October 2010

I know, I’ve fallen behind on this. I have the list of books I want to rec each month, just haven’t had the time to write up the info. But I’m almost there, and for this installment you get two months for the price of one!

Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay. Okay, okay, you know GGK’s my favorite author evah, so I was predisposed to love this book. But I’ve loved some of his more than others, and this one’s toward the top of the list. What I love is how he immerses the reader into the characters—so often, I feel like I know them, even in just a few pages—and the world. For those of you who haven’t read him, what he does is take a historic time period and creates a very similar fantasy world. Characters may be based on real historic people—but he’s explained that he doesn’t want to write a historical novel and put words in people’s mouths. It’s his way of exploring that time and place and those events in history. The fantasy/magic in Under Heaven is subtle—it’s not dragons and wizards—so don’t expect that going in. Also, it’s a big book, and gorgeously written, not something you’ll want to skim, so block out the time to savor it.

Hyperbole and a Half. Hyperbole and a Half is a web comic, and it’s…well, there are a couple I’ve read repeatedly, and each time, by the end I’m crying with laughter. The artwork is crude but amazingly deft—those little stick figures have real emotion and reaction in their triangular faces—but it’s her stories that are the gems. She mostly relates scenes from her childhood, dipping into how her childlike brain interpreted a situation and made decisions, but told with an adult’s perspective. Does that make any sense? I don’t know! All I know is that in November, I went back to the very first page of the Hyperbole and a Half blog, and I read it all the way through to the present. (In the beginning she just tells funny stories; the cartoons come later and really are the icing on the cake.) My personal favorites are “This is Why I’ll Never Be an Adult,” “The Party,” and “The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas”. Paaaarp!

Ashes and Light, Karen L. McKee. I had the privilege of copyediting this book, which was fantastic because it’s something I might never have picked up otherwise (except maybe for the fact that the author is a writer-friend). A romantic suspense set in modern Afghanistan? Really? NY publishing just wasn’t ready for that (she got great “we love it but the subject matter scares us”-type rejections), and that’s NY publishing’s loss. Also, McKee knows her stuff—she’s a world traveler and has visited Afghanistan. Romantic, suspenseful, and in an unusual and exotic location. Yum. 

Jukebox stories, Dean Wesley Smith. Over the years, Smith has written and published a number of stories set in the same bar with the same basic premise that’s explained at the very beginning of each story (so, this is not a spoiler, ‘kay?): There’s a jukebox that has the ability to send a listener back in time to when a particular song had meaning for him. And when he’s back there, he has the length of the song to change things if he chooses. We all have a moment we regret, right? Or a moment we look back on and say, at the very least, what if I’d done X instead of Y? Smith explores this idea in each story, often to heart-wrenching results. Some characters chose to change the past, for better or worse; others don’t. I’ve been wanting to read these for years, and Smith is now publishing them online. Each week he’s publishing a free story on his website (some Jukebox stories, some not), so keep an eye there; you can also buy the rest of them as e-books via the usual venues (Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc.). Also, here’s a link to an e-book of a collection of five of the stories. I suspect he'll have a paperback of them out soon!

Recommended Reading, July–August

I’m thinking of starting a semi-regular post here (ideally once a month, but it could easily slip) recommending things (books, short stories, possibly even non-fiction) I’ve read and thought were awesome. Of course, I’d love to know if anyone reading this would be remotely interested in something like that…  :-)

I want to make something clear from the outset: I am not a reviewer. I will not be reviewing books. I’m a writer; my job is to write. If I were a reviewer, then I would be honor-bound to talk about things I didn’t like as well as things I liked. I will not do that, at least not in a public forum. I may talk privately (and by that I mean conversation; I’m leery even of e-mails, which can be forwarded) about a book that I personally thought failed. (For example, there’s an award-winning book that I still intend to try again to read, because I want to understand why it’s award-winning, that some of you have heard me rant about because certain details are insanely wrong and I threw the book across the room on my first attempt to read it.) The bottom line is that these are my colleagues, these are people I work with even if I never meet them or engage directly with them in some form. I give them the respect I would hope they give me, as a fellow colleague and writer.

So what this is, is stuff I’ve read that I think you should read because I loved it. If you don’t want to read it, groovy. It may not be to your taste. I’ll try to explain why I liked it. That’s all.

‘kay? ‘kay. Onwards! Here’s what got me fired up in July and August:

“Fair Ladies,” Theodora Goss, Apex Online. Strangely, I had to look this one back up to remember why I loved it. And I was drawn in once again…. Theodora Goss has a way of writing stories that you just believe happened; her details are…believable is the best word I can come up with. It’s a story about a person, and about a country. That’s a difficult balance to achieve; usually stories are small or big, but this one manages to be both.

Arcadia Falls, Carol Goodman. I’ve made my adoration for Carol Goodman’s books clear here, I think. Are they all perfect? No. I’ve loved some more than others. But they all are the type of book I love, and are hard to find. They’re Gothics in the sense of isolation, of thick atmosphere, of mystery, of dread. One might call them supernatural mysteries now, but labels, blah blah blah. Arcadia Falls takes place in upstate NY, not quite as upstate as where I grew up, but close enough to be familiar. I suspect I loved this one for its Arts and Crafts cottage as much as its atmosphere and slowly unfolding truth about the past. Goodman has tread these themes before, to the point that I was figuring things out before I was intended to. But this is the type of book where the journey, for me, is more sweet that the goal. Just because I figured out the secret doesn’t make the immersion into the place and people less compelling. I’ve been reading Goodman’s books from the library, and I think I need to buy them for my own library so I can indulge again and again.

Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire. I read a fair amount of urban fantasy, and while I enjoy it, it’s the type of thing that rarely stays with me. It was a fun ride, but once I’ve finished the book, I don’t remember the characters; in other words, I wasn’t invested in them as real people. (That’s not a negative, per se: the same is true for thrillers. I’m reading them for the wild ride, not for the lasting impact, and that’s okay.) So I was surprise when Rosemary and Rue proceeded to rock my world. I believed in October (Toby) Daye, I liked her, and I cared about her. McGuire doesn’t make things easy for her character; in fact, I gasped more than once at how much shit she put Toby through. Although I knew, given the genre, that Toby would be alive at the end, that didn’t at all mean that Toby wouldn’t be damaged and irrevocably changed by the end. Hell, that happens in the first few pages—and that’s not a spoiler, just an acknowledgement that this book will grab you by the throat from the get-go and not let you off the roller coaster until the end. This series is now on my automatic To Buy list.

Bite Me, Parker Blue. I was pondering a Kindle, and my friend Shanna offered to loan me hers, as it wasn’t thrilling her the way she wanted it to. One of the books she had on it was Bite Me, and it was, of the options, the most interesting-sounding, so I started reading it in bits and snippets when I wasn’t reading everything else that’s piled around here. What I found was that I kept finding excuses to pick up the Kindle and read more (which proved to be a major point in favor for the Kindle, as it was easy to throw in my purse or carry around the house). I’m not a fan of vampire books per se; I’m not against them, but I don’t seek them about because so many of them are been-there-done-that or just outright twee. The heroine of Bite Me is very Buffy-esque (and I loved Buffy, so I was wary), but without the support network Buffy builds around her. Oh, Val starts building that network—my favorite is her hellhound, Fang (you’ve gotta read the book to experience the wonderful snark of Fang, truly!), but she’s young and nervous the way you’d expect and believe a Young Adult heroine to be, even if she’s a vampire slayer. Among other things….