“‘Tis not right, a woman going into such places by herself.”* – A Book List

As promised, here’s the list of books containing older women as important characters that my friends and I came up with on Twitter a couple weeks ago. Clicking on the photos will take you to the book’s Amazon page.

Thanks to @grumpymartian, @whateversusan, @chrysoula, @AthenaHelivoy, @JustinSRobinson, @byharryconnolly, @LJLietya, @KateElliottSFF, and @clundoff for chiming in!

	Mindscape, Andrea Hairston: an older woman gets the action going; another older woman has a hand in trying to destroy what the first set out to accomplish.
The first four books of the Deverry series, Katharine Kerr: I didn’t get any details on this one.
	Crown of Stars series, Kate Elliott: “One of the POVs … is a scholar who is about 50. She’s technically a secondary POV.”-@KateElliottSFF
Silver Moon, Catherine Lundoff: main character becomes a werewolf as part of menopause at 50.
	Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold: the main character is in her 40s/50s, possibly late 30s (there was some discussion about this).
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle: Molly Grue and Mommy Fortuna
	Downbelow Station, C.J. Cherryh: I’m not sure of her age, but as commander of an interstellar battleship, Signy Mallory must be a mature woman, close in age to Captain Janeway.
Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin: the main character is Tenar, a woman who has aged through the Earthsea series and is now middle-aged.
	Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed: “majority of characters are older”-@grumpymartian
The Day Before the Revolution (from the short story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters), Ursula K. Le Guin: the protagonist from The Dispossessed returns as a much older woman.
	Swan Song, Robert R. McCammon: “mostly the older characters tell the story”-@grumpymartian

Another book was brought up in our conversation that hasn’t been published yet: The Great Way, an epic fantasy trilogy by Harry Connolly. It’ll be out later this year.

@chrysoula @MFennVT I'll be releasing one later this year because I couldn't find one I wanted to read.

— Gluten Dragon (@byharryconnolly) February 12, 2014

And, to finish up, these are the Discworld books that involve Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. To quote Wikipedia:

[Weatherwax] has starred in six Discworld novels (Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade and Carpe Jugulum), has appeared briefly in Wee Free Men, acted as a significant supporting character in A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, and I Shall Wear Midnight, and was referenced in three other Discworld books (by name in Mort, and anonymously in Thief of Time as well as Going Postal). She also appeared in the short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” and in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

Nanny Ogg appears in the same Discworld novels as Granny W., as well as the short story “The Sea and Little Fishes.” She also makes a cameo appearance in Thief of Time. Have you read any of these? Are there others you’d recommend? Let us know!

*–Granny Weatherwax, Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett)

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson – A Review

  

The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.

She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

     

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I’m hoping that Frankenstein is going to be the worst in the pile of books I’ve challenged myself to read this year. It’s been so much fun to discover new-to-me authors like N.K. Jemisin and Hiromi Goto and rediscover someone like Ursula K. Le Guin. I want the fun to keep on coming.

Today I get to talk about another new-to-me discovery: Nalo Hopkinson‘s Brown Girl in the Ring. This book is Hopkinson’s first, published in 1998. Hopkinson won the Locus Award for Best New Novel, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as well as the Warner Aspect first novel competition for her work. Plus the book has a blurb on the front cover from none other than Octavia Butler.

So, it wasn’t like I was going in with any expectations or anything.

Brown Girl in the Ring takes place in a future Toronto, a city that’s been turned into a “donut hole”–anyone who could escaped from the decaying city to the suburbs, leaving the town and the people behind to rot. One of these people is Ti-Jeanne, a young Caribbean Canadian who survives with her infant son and her grandmother, Gros-Jeanne, a healer and seer. Ti-Jeanne has started seeing visions herself–demons and skeletons in top hats, among other things. While she’s trying to deal with this, her ex- (her son’s father) comes to her looking for help. He has gotten messed up with a necromancer of sorts who wants Tony to harvest a human heart from the premier of Ontario. Mayhem ensues.

I really enjoyed this book. Hopkinson has done a fine job building this dystopian world; it’s one I would love to learn more about. She’s created the remains of an inner city that are wholly believable, rich, and three-dimensional. I’m also thankful for the chance to learn about a culture I admit I know little about.

The same richness can be found in Hopkinson’s characters. They’re all fairly well developed, enough so, anyway, to contribute something to the tale. Rudy may be a bit over the top, but he’s a fun guy to hate, and he gave me the shivers.

Hopkinson’s prose is sturdy. While it isn’t magic on the level of Le Guin, it gets the job done and contains some awesome metaphors such as a character shaking someone’s hand as if he were “palping rotten carrion” and comparing the smell of night air to “biting into an apple.” All in all an excellent read. 4.75/5

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin – A Review

  Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. – H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. – Zhuangzi: XXIII

 
 
 
 
 

 

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And we’re on to the third book in my Women of Genre Fiction challenge. I’ll spoil my review right now and tell you that it’s my favorite of the three.

As a lot of you already know, Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Lathe of Heaven is the story of George Orr, a man whose dreams can change reality. He tries to prevent this by drugging himself dreamless, but that doesn’t work and he ends up in “voluntary” therapy. His therapist, Dr. Haber, is at first suspicious of Orr’s claims, but when he experiences what Orr’s dreams can do first hand, he chooses to use George instead of help him, claiming he’s working for the greater good of humankind. We all know how that kind of thing usually plays out, don’t we?

Concerned about how Dr. Haber is treating him, George seeks out the assistance of an attorney, Heather LeLache, who then becomes involved in his life and his dreams.

What do I love about this book? Not sure where to begin. I fell in love part way through the first paragraph and was sad when it ended. Now, I just want to start over and read the book again and again until I memorize it.

There isn’t just one thing that stands out. Le Guin’s prose is delicious: heartwrenching, beautiful, and sharply funny.I love the way she plays with language, the words she makes up, the ones she borrows from other works, and the humor she finds in language itself. (Oh, the French diseases of the soul.)

The story itself is strong: dark and creepy, a mix of George Orwell and Philip K. Dick (I know I’m not the first person to come up with that combination). The characters Le Guin creates are wonderful and stick with me, the two I adore and the one I detest, as well. Orr himself is such a strong person for all his quiet fear and insecurity. At one point in the novel, LeLache describes him as such:

It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.

The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

…He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.

And then there are the turtles. I won’t say anything more of them, but they are a special part of the book.

Crossings in mist…

I do wonder at the changes that happen to one character’s persona as the book progresses, and Le Guin even brings this up at the end of the story. Why does George change this one person in his dreams and not the other person who’s truly hurting him, and what do those choices mean, if they are his choices?

So much to think about. One of the many reasons I need to reread The Lathe of Heaven. Brilliant book. I love it. 5/5

Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge

I don’t normally do reading challenges. Not that I’m all superior to them or anything. I just hate taking on obligations I may not be able to meet. That, and, well yeah, I’ll read what I want when I want, thanks very much, is usually how I feel.

That said, this year’s challenge from Worlds Without End caught my eye on Sunday, and I decided to sign on. That challenge is to read 12 books by 12 women genre authors in 12 months. Looking over the list of possibilities, it reminded me that there is still so much to read, and I hadn’t read as many authors on the list as I wish I had.

Time to amend that.

Although for me, it’s going to be 12 books in 6 months, because of the whole just discovering this two days ago thing. Fortunately, I read fairly quickly.

The other aspect of this challenge is that I have to review all 12 of those books. Blog post material!

Here’s what I’m going to read (Note that I’ve not read any of these books before and I made it a point to choose authors I haven’t read before either, for the most part.):

• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (One of two of these that I own, part of R’s massive collection of older sf.)
• Sea Kings of Mars, Leigh Brackett. I decided to change the Brackett book I’d picked because it’s now almost November and Sea Kings of Mars is crazy long. Now I’m going to read…
• The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett
• The Between, Tananarive Due
• Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin (Elgin I’ve read, but only one short story. Really looking forward to this and the rest of the trilogy it belongs to; that short story is one of my favorites, “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me.”)
• Outlander, Diana Gabaldon This one’s wicked long, too, so I changed it out for…
• Downbelow Station, C.J. Cherryh (which is also long, but not quite as)
• Half World, Hiromi Goto
• Mindscape, Andrea Hairston
• Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin
• The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin (Surprisingly, A Wizard of Earthsea is the only Le Guin book I’ve read, and that was 30 years ago. I love the film of The Lathe of Heaven PBS made, so this is another one I’m looking forward to.)
• Up the Walls of the World, Alice Bradley Sheldon (AKA James Tiptree, Jr.) (Another one from R’s collection. No, that’s not the only reason I hooked up with him. Jeez, people. [It was the record collection that did it, actually.])
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente

I’m actually excited to read all of these, not just the ones I commented on. And the first one’s already done; just need to write the review. Oh, Victor.

What do you think of reading challenges in general and this one in particular? Are there books by the authors above you think are better? (I can change what I’m reading any time.)