Favorite Reads of 2018

As we celebrate the passing of 2018 and look forward to 2019, I’m looking back at my favorite reads from this year. As my reading is probably 85% backlist, these books were mostly not published in 2018; this is very much a list of my favorites from recent reading rather than any attempt at marking the best books of 2018. Links take you to my original review of each book on my 2018 reading thread on LibraryThing.

Grumpy Monkey, Suzanne Lang and Max Lang

While I just love, love, love the messages in this picture book about emotions, namely that negative emotions are okay to feel and that they will pass, what really makes it stand out to me as one of my favorite reads of the year are the illustrations. The emotions on Jim the monkey’s face are so expressive, helpfully illustrating the story and the message of the book while also being fun and humorous. Go look at the illustration on the front cover. I dare you not to smile.

Seven Days of Us, Francesca Hornak

One of the great surprises of my 2018 reading, Seven Days of Us absolutely charmed me with its story of a family forced to spend a holiday week in close proximity. I expected to enjoy the book but not nearly as much as I ended up doing. The story was fast-paced and fairly light while also providing more substance than I was expecting. Ultimately this was a fully satisfying family drama that I couldn’t put down.

We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nahesi Coates

Coates’s collection of eight essays from the eight years of Obama’s presidency plus reflections on each of them was definitely my hardest read of 2018. It was also the most important by far. I learned so many things from this book that I didn’t know before, and many of the essays also clarified for me things I sort of knew but which were a bit jumbled up in my mind. If you’re looking to understand race relations and racism in American today, this is an excellent place to start.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers’s first novel is a cozy space adventure peopled by a complex, delightful found family making up a ship’s crew. I can’t recommend it more if you want a sci-fi story that will make you feel things, many of them warm and fuzzy.

The Tea Dragon Society, Katie O’Neill

Ah, The Tea Dragon Society. Has anything ever been as pure and warm and delightful as this middle grade graphic novel? The story presents the idea of tea dragons, feline-like dragons whose horns produce tea leaves. The dragons are adorable, and the story focuses on their care, which is exacting and requires great commitment from their carers. The book is largely a meditation on hard, rewarding work. Recommended in the strongest terms to just about anyone.

The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennet, read by the author

I read Alan Bennet’s novella about Queen Elizabeth II becoming a devout reader for the second time in 2018, but this time I listened to the audiobook, read by Bennet himself. The story is masterful, compelling, and fun in any format, but Bennet’s reading of it adds that little something that pushes it into possibly all-time favorite territory.

There you are, my favorite reads from 2018! What reads did you enjoy the most this past year?

For We Read a Little Christmas

One of my favorite things to do to get into the Christmas spirit is read a nice Christmassy book. Here’s a list of some of my favorites, along with a good few that I haven’t gotten to yet but have high hopes for.

Feels Like Christmas... Even If It's Not

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

Some books put me in mind of Christmas even though they have little or nothing to do with the holiday itself. I’m not sure what it says about me that the books that do that for me are fantasy novels, but perhaps the connection is not all that odd. After all, both of these series are deeply invested in the messages of Christianity, even if they are not overtly about Christianity or Christmas.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year... to Fall in Love

How the Dukes Stole Christmas, Tessa Dare, Sarah MacLean, Sophie Jordan, and Joanna Shupe

True-Blue Cowboy Christmas, Nicole Helm

Winter Wonderland, Heidi Cullinan

Nothing says Christmas reading to me like a lovely holiday romance novel. How the Dukes is a collection of four novellas with historical settings by four big names in historical romance. Each of these four stories is in light conversation with a famous Christmas story, and part of the fun of this collection is picking out the references and echoes. True-Blue is a contemporary cowboy romance and hits traditional things associated with 21^st century Christmas celebrating pretty hard—you’ll find tree trimming and cookie making and so on here. Wonderland is an m/m contemporary with slight BDSM overtones. Like many of Cullinan’s works, it’s most excellent in its exploration of male friendship and found family. While the steam levels for these recommendations vary, note that none of them is “sweet”—there’s sex on the page in each of them. So heads up if that is not your flavor.

Deck the Halls with Deductive Reasoning

Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards

The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, edited by Tara Moore 

Here are two collections of Christmas tales that are on my TBR. Since I haven’t read them yet, I can’t vouch for them personally, but I am excited to give them a go. Silent Nights collects fifteen mysteries set at Christmas by British writers, and Ghost Stories presents thirteen Christmas-set ghost stories from the Victorian age. As a fan of A Christmas Carol, I’m particularly interested in tucking into the latter.

Oldies But Goodies

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas

The Homecoming, Earl Hamner, Jr

Carol and Wales are two of my all-time favorite Christmas stories. I reread Carol every year and have done so since I was in my late teens. If you have never read it (especially if you have only ever seen one of the many admittedly very wonderful film adaptations), I encourage you to give it a try. It’s just the right length to satisfy any desire for Victorian vibes you may have (everyone gets wistful for Victorian times at Christmas, right? No? Just me?) without bogging you down, the details are exquisite, it’s funny, and it’s a wonderful redemption story. Wales is a short story just brimming with old-fashioned Christmas delights and absolutely stunning language. The Homecoming is the novel upon which the TV movie of the same name (which in turn spawned the TV show The Waltons) was based, and it’s a fascinating evocation of Christmas in depression-era Appalachia. Hamner captures his characters (especially the children) so quickly in small moments that they seem to jump off the page.

A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That

The Snow Queen and Other Winter Tales, Barnes and Noble

A Family Christmas, selected by Caroline Kennedy

A Christmas Treasury, Barnes and Noble

These three anthologies all provide a variety of Christmassy and winter tales and stories. Winter Tales is heavy on traditional tales and fairy tales, including many by Hans Christian Andersen, though stories by Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde also appear, as well as a few traditional Native American tales. A highlight may be Alexander Dumas’s novella-length The History of the Nutcracker, which retells E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (which, unfortunately, is not included). Family Christmas includes mostly shorter Christmas pieces, and contains a lot of songs and poems as well as stories and articles. Be aware that not everything in this collection will be suitable for (or appealing to) children. Treasury collects ten stories and nine poems and would be an excellent one-shot for snagging several classics of Christmastime, including Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” This anthology also includes lovely full-color and black and white illustrations.

And This Is All True

Perhaps you prefer your Christmas reads with a side of learnin’? This pair of nonfiction Christmas books may suit you. These are also on my TBR (so again, I can’t recommend them personally, except to say that I want to read them).

Why Was the Partridge in the Pear Tree?, Reverend Mark Lawson-Jones

A Jane Austen Christmas, Maria Grace

Partridge is an illustrated little book that explores the history behind popular Christmas carols, examining the meaning of the lyrics, the relevant biblical passages, and the historical context of the carols. In thirteen chapters, Lawson-Jones discusses the history of carols and caroling, the Puritan dislike of Christmas, and the “golden age of carols” before devoting ten chapters to a carol each. Carols discussed include “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” "The Holly and the Ivy,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “The Coventry Carol” and two of my most favorites, “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Once in Royal David’s City.” Austen Christmas illustrates what the celebration of Christmas looked like during Jane Austen’s time (the Regency), before the advent of much of the traditions we associate with Christmas now, many of which began later, in the Victorian period. Topics addressed include dress, games, caroling, gift-giving, food (including recipes), and charity.

What do you like to read at Christmastime? Are any of my favorites your favorites too?

When Someone Changes My Mind about a Book

Have you ever written off an unread book, thinking you were just never going to want to read it, and then had something change your mind? This has happened to me quite a few times lately--usually because I heard the book discussed on a podcast--and it's always a startling "Ooo, really?" moment where I feel my understanding of the book in question shifting. 

Some books I've shuffled back onto my mental TBR pile after thinking I was done with them include Dune, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Great Gastby, and Unsheltered. I had tried reading Dune and Owen Meany before and given up on them without getting terribly far. Then I heard a small piece of information about each of them that made me say, "What? I didn't know it was about that." In the case of Dune, it was the incorporation in the story of Arabic mythology and culture; for Owen Meany, it was its exploration of the Vietnam War. I imagine that these are not, like, well kept secrets about these books, but I hadn't picked up on them before hearing someone talk about why they enjoyed the stories. The Great Gatsby I have read before--twice--and just do not get. But hearing how much others have loved the book makes me want to try at least one more time. And Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, simply sounded not my kind of thing... until I heard it discussed on a podcast, and suddenly it sounded compelling and well worth my time.

For every one of these books, the thing that changed my mind about wanting to read them was hearing someone else talk about them--not reading reviews or seeing them on "best of" lists, but getting to hear the enthusiasm in another reader's voice. Some of them were discussed on PBS's The Great American Read; some came up on A Good Read, a BBC podcast featuring guests discussing a favorite read with host Harriet Gilbert; and some of them were a topic of discussion on the bookish podcast From the Front Porch. For inspiring me to read (or reconsider reading!) a book, nothing matches listening to someone who loves it talk about why.

What books have you reconsidered after hearing someone else love on them?

Laura Recommends...

...a podcast: The Anthropocene Reviewed
This podcast from author and Vlogbrother John Green is basically a series of spoken personal essays about things he finds interesting. He describes it as "reviews [of] facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale." Episodes consist of two "reviews," usually on unrelated topics. They are packed with interesting information about the topics and always consider them carefully. Past reviews have considered the penny, the weather, Hawaiian pizza, and the Lascaux paintings. The Anthropocene Reviewed never fails to make me pause and  reflect about an aspect of our world. 

...and another: Annotated
Annotated is a monthly Book Riot podcast which presents a radio documentary about a book-adjacent topic. Their tagline is "stories about books, reading, and language." I always learn something listening to Annotated, often about a subject I had never even heard of before. Past episodes have explored Louie Braille, Andrew Carnegie and the American public library, the workings of the New York Times bestseller list, and Truman Capote's short story that ended his career. New episodes come out on the first of the month.

...a TV show: Mars
Mars started its second season this week, and it's a television show unlike any I've ever seen. Part of each episode is a fictionalized story set in the 2030s about a group of scientists trying to establish a permanent research station on Mars. The rest of the program is a present-day documentary about how such a mission could be prepared for an accomplished. It's a unique and effective blend of fact and speculative fiction, the result of which is riveting TV. The first season is available on Blu-ray; the second is currently airing on the National Geographic Channel. The website (linked above) is also well worth checking out. Be warned that the while there's nothing particularly graphic about the show, the fictionalized portions can be intense--there's every reason to believe that life might be lost in such a mission, and the show does not shy away from that fact.

...a documentary: The Most Unknown
A science documentary with an unusual format, The Most Unknown follows nine scientists as they meet fellow scientists working in fields other than their own and learn about those  disciplines from their colleagues. The film starts by following one scientist, who then meets and learns from a colleague. Then that colleague meets and learns from someone else, and so on until the chain circles back around to the first scientist. This format allows for a fascinating glimpse into nine different fields--including psychology, marine biology, and particle physics--and showcases learning, science, and curiosity. This is one of the most enjoyable programs I've watched in a long time. The Most Unknown is available on Netflix. 


(Podcast links above take you to a web presence for each show, sometimes a website, sometimes a patreon, whevs, something associated directly with that podcast. Invariably, the best way to listen, however, is to subscribe through your podcatcher of choice. If you're looking for a new (or your first) podcatcher, your Googling skills should snag you some good recommendation lists for iphone and Android. I use Podcast Addict. It does the thing.)

Great American Read Result Is a Yawn... But the Process Was Eye-Opening

After months of voting for PBS's Great American Read, readers  have named To Kill a Mockingbird America's favorite book.
.
.
.

Shocker. 

The result had to be something that scads of people have read and loved, and even though The Great American Read was about finding America's favorite book, not finding the great American book, it seemed likely that Americans would stump for an American work (although the top ten out of the one hundred books up for voting was 50/50 American and British books). Given the continued prevalence of To Kill a Mockingbird on middle school and high school syllabii, its accessibility, and its themes that speak to what feel like distinctly American issues with near-universal applicability, it would have been *wild* to me if To Kill a Mockingbird had not come out at the top of this list of one hundred titles.* Just, statistically, how could it have been otherwise?

Which leads me to the question I asked myself when I first heard about The Great American Read, which was, why bother? "Harry Potter, Rings, Pride and Prejudice, possibly Jane Eyre and Moby Dick will all be high on the list," I thought to myself as soon as I heard about this summer of voting for "our" favorite read. "Gone with the Wind probably on the list, and Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird wins." Here are the top ten, per PBS's site:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
2. Outlander (Series)
3. Harry Potter (Series)
4. Pride and Prejudice
5. Lord of the Rings
6. Gone with the Wind
7. Charlotte's Web
8. Little Women
9. Chronicles of Narnia
10. Jane Eyre
11. 
    
12. 
    

 Gatsby was #15, Moby Dick #46.

Look, I'm not trying to toot my own horn here. It's not that I have some remarkable magic finger on the pulse of bookish America or something. My point is that you don't have to have your finger on the pulse of anything to predict this with decent accuracy.** If you have any sense of what Americans are made to read in school and what has historically resonated with a lot of them, this list was utterly predictable. And there's been some confused noises along those lines from some bookish media. (A recent episode of the Book Riot Podcast gives a decent discussion of the Heh? aspects of The Great American Read as a project. Minute 18:18-26:55.***)

But I wonder if focusing on the result, on the "winner" after all this voting, is maybe to look past the value of doing something like The Great American Read the way PBS did it. They didn't just do a poll, giving out a list and asking people to pick their favorites. They made a series of documentary programs about the one hundred books on the original list and organized community and library events related to the book list. I've watched most of the documentaries (if there were community or library events in my area, I didn't hear about them), and while those TV episodes certainly aren't the most inspired bits of documentary television you're ever going to see (it's mostly talking heads, with the occasional kinda neat animated graphic), I  enjoyed watching them, and most of all thrilled to see people talk passionately about the books they love. The episodes feature interviews with many authors, both about their own books that are on the list and about other books on the list that have meant something to them, as well as interviews with other book-adjacent folk discussing why various books are important to them personally, or culturally, or historically. The documentaries aren't terribly nuanced. You won't, for instance, find much considered criticism of any of the books.**** However, the point wasn't to consider these works fully, but to convince you to read them. And as much as I also find the idea of voting to name Americans' favorite read a little pointless (see the top ten list), impossibly fraught logistically (who actually voted? who had the opportunity to vote? in what ways was the voting system that allowed you to vote for each book once a day for months being gamed? which huge swathes of readers didn't have their voice represented because they don't watch or pay any attention to PBS?*****), and rather reductive (the one hundred books they started with is a much more interesting and representative list than the final "winner," or even the top ten), I'm glad The Great American Read was there trying to convince me to read these books. After watching the various episodes of the show, I am inspired to read (or in two cases, reread) these eight books:
  

1. Ghost
2. Tales of the City
3. Bless Me, Ultima
4. The Great Gatsby
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany
6. A Separate Peace
7. Dune
8. The Joy Luck Club
9. 
   

Some of these I'd never heard of before, some I'd known about but just never heard anything that prompted me to read them, some I've read and thought I was done with. Maybe that was the point all along. To encourage us and inspire us to read, and to read beyond our current horizons. And that is no bad thing.


What did you think of The Great American Read? Did you watch the show? Did you vote? Is your favorite on the top ten list? 


*According to The Great American Read finale episode, To Kill a Mockingbird started out on the first day of voting in the number one position and never fell from it.
**I think the only genuine surprise in this top ten is Outlander, a book I love (I've only read the first of the series) and which I know a lot of other people do too. But I would never have thought of it in this context. There's been some speculation that there was a concentrated effort by Outlander fans to vote as often as they could to get the book/series as high up the rankings as possible. *shrug* The Great American Read voting system was designed in a way that clearly allowed (even encouraged?) people to do just that, so the fact that some people may have done so feels like a legit part of this particular voting process. It does make me really curious to see data on numbers of unique votes for each of these books though. Like, if Outlander received 100 votes (small numbers here for convenience), how many of them came from the same ten people over time? I'm curious about this for every book on here; Outlander just brings the question to the fore. The finale claims that it took at least 56,196 votes for a book to make it into the top twenty list, but they said nothing about how many (or whether they even know) of those were unique votes.
***For a correction to/discussion of the statement in this episode that the top ten list is 100% white, see the next episode of the podcast. It's to do with Diana Gabaldon's Hispanic ancestry.
****If you haven't read Roxane Gay's article in which she explains why she doesn't "harbor reverence and nostalgia" for To Kill a Mockingbird, do.
*****According to the final episode of The Great American Read, over four million votes were received. If every one of those were a unique vote (certainly they weren't, based on the voting system's design allowing individuals to vote many more times than once), that would only be slightly more than 1% of the population of the US. Also, while many of the books by authors of color on the list of one hundred ended up high in the rankings, the fact that the bottom ten of the one hundred books was almost fully books by authors of color was both heartbreaking and telling about whose voices maybe weren't included here, despite the project's clear efforts to make the episodes of the show themselves pretty inclusive.

Identifying the Core Books of My Heart (and Head)

As I continue to think about books and how I want them, their physical selves, in my space and what I want that to look like, I keep coming back to the idea of the "core" books that hold meaning for me. These core books are those (relatively) few out of the thousands in our house that are the absolute most important, the ones that, if I had to reduce my book collection to only what would fit in one or two bookcases, would be the ones sitting in that honored space.

I can't quite imagine actually reducing my collection that far (unless out of necessity brought on by circumstances, such as dramatically reduced living space), but it has been helpful to me to think about what those collections would be--and to create them digitally through the collections function on LibraryThing. I have created four collections there:* Core Heart, the clutch-them-to-my-chest reads that are my absolute favorites; Core Head, the books that speak more to my head than my heart that I would feel somehow lost without; Secondary Heart, chest clutchers that just aren't quite important enough to me to be core; Secondary Head, ditto for those "head" books that I could probably do without but would very much rather not. 

This has been a fascinating process, though one that constantly threatens to descend into the depths of absurd hairsplitting. (Is Harry Potter's Bookshelf head or heart? Okay, but is it core or secondary?) I find that if I stop thinking about it so hard, most of the books I've considered (many of my books are definitely not even in contention) fall pretty solidly into one of those four categories. The trick is to stop thinking. That's the hard bit.

Some things I've learned by doing this so far:

*Most of my Core Heart books are things I read early in my life--if not in childhood, then certainly by my early twenties. This feels both right and slightly sad. (Cue Kathleen Kelly quote about childhood reading.) Right because, well, childhood reading. Sad because *sobs* why can't reading be like it was when I was twelve anymore?

*Despite the fact that I mostly can't seem to read series these days, a lot of the books in my Core Heart collection *are* series (Harry Potter, the Little House books, the Minnesota Christmas romance novels, The Lord of the Rings (that one is not really a series, but in the sense that I read three books back-to-back-to-back.) I suspect this points to my love of character over any other element of fiction. 

*Books I've read more recently that end up in Core Heart are more likely to be graphics-based than not (comics, graphic novels,  picture books).

*The line between Core Heart and Core Head is not terribly logical, but it is the distinction I have the least trouble feeling. JRR Tolkien's collected letters are Core Heart; C.S. Lewis's are Core Head. Pride and Prejudice is Core Heart; the rest of Austen's novels are Core Head.

I still have some work to do on the collections--every other day or so a thought strikes me in the shower or over breakfast: "Did I put such-and-such book into one of my core collections?!" And of course they will get fine-tuned over time, with books shuffling among collections, new reads getting slotted in, and perhaps, the odd book falling from favor entirely.

What books would you put in a core collection? And would you divide them differently than I have (or not at all?) 

*If you're, like, super interested, you can navigate to those collections on LT through my profile.

The Pleasures and Perils of Serialized Narratives

It's no secret that I've fallen down an Arrow-shaped rabbit hole this summer. I have been speeding through the whole series, rewatching the first four seasons and then moving on to seasons five and six, which I had never seen before. I should finish season six some time in the next week or so, meaning that I will have consumed a show that was designed to unfold over six television seasons in just under two months. Arrow operates as a serialized long narrative each season, and I am *terrible* at consuming that kind of media the way it is "supposed" to be consumed (or at least, as it is originally presented), that is, one episode, roughly once a week, for months on end. I lose interest if I have to wait so long to see what happens next, and what's more, I lose the thread of what was happening. 

This has long been true of me, but I only really put it together once streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime made it easy to go back and watch entire series that I missed when they aired. Suddenly I was free to watch a show exactly on my own terms. One episode every night until you're through all of it? Fine. A giant binge of seven eps at a time twice a week? Whatever keeps your yacht from going down, man. The whole of a season in one weekend? You very much do you. Of course this was possible before streaming, what with DVD sets, but they require so much more effort and stuff. (I have a fair few complete DVD sets of TV shows. They are organizing themselves into a union and planning how to force us to build them their own addition off the back of the house.) And if you were getting those sets from Netflix through the mail or from the library, sometimes you only had one disc worth of show when you were in the mood for so much more. And the last disc of the season often only had one ep on it! (The horror!) You pick up the facetiousness I'm putting down, I'm sure. The point is simply that over the course of my adulthood we went from being largely SOL if we wanted to watch a TV show that wasn't currently airing (or in reruns) (unless you had big bucks to buy the set) to being able to watch thousands of shows in their entirety for a flat monthly fee. This development hasn't so much changed the way I watch TV but gotten me to watch TV (again).

I caught a lot of programs in reruns as a kid, and throughout middle school and high school I had my shows that I did. not. miss. (Even if that always meant recording them to watch on the weekend.) Here's the thing though, whether because television was just like that back then or because I cannot watch ongoing plot arcs over the course of months, none of those shows required me to remember anything specific from one episode to the next. (Except for maybe the last few seasons of DS9. Which, you guys, I have almost no recollection of. Like, what even happened after the war started? I have no idea.) But once the shows I started watching in high school ended, I... pretty much stopped watching TV. This was partly situational--it's harder to follow a weekly television program in grad school, though I watched *a lot* of movies during that period, so it wasn't strictly a time issue. I did watch some TV I missed during that time as well (Queer as Folk, Doctor Who), but only when I could get my hands on at least four episodes to watch in one go.  

Since I have had access to streaming services, I have caught up on a lot more TV, and I have gotten into shows I otherwise never would have. Farscape, Veronica Mars, and yes, Arrow, are all shows I've watched over streaming, entirely on my own terms as far as how much at once and how often, that I'm quite sure I would have bailed on if I had watched them weekly as they aired. These shows are serialized continuous narratives, where little clues to the major plot of a whole season might be dropped one at a time, episodes apart. Sometimes a character is introduced in one episode and then returns four episodes later and you have to remember who they are! What they look like! Their name! What they were up to! I just can't hold these things in my brain over weeks and weeks, especially if I leave that narrative world for a long time in between installments (like say, over the winter hiatus of a show. And if there's a cliffhanger at the end of the season, forget about it.) But if I watch that same material over the course of a week or two, I'm golden. 

Arrow provides an excellent case in point. A dear friend and her husband casually suggested over dinner while I was visiting them a few years ago that I might enjoy this show based on the Green Arrow comics character. I think some variation of the phrase "Oh, you'll like Oliver Queen" may have been employed. (Understatement.) Shortly thereafter, I found Arrow on streaming, fell in love (the first nine episodes of season one are seriously like someone buttonsmashing all of my narrative kinks over and over for six hours), and tore through the first three seasons, rushing the last one a bit to be caught up in time to watch season four as it aired. Aaaaand I hated season four, not because it wasn't good but because trying to watch it threaded out over nine months (nine!) made me lose all interest in what was going on... because I couldn't remember what was going on. And when season five rolled around, I just didn't bother. Season four is still my least favorite season,* but I'm convinced that my disappointment stemmed mostly from the way I was watching it. When I rewatched it this summer at my own speed I was like 8,000 times more invested in it than I was the first time.

I have precisely this same problem with books. If I put a book down for more than a day or two without reading at least some of it, I lose all connection to it and no longer have much interest in jumping back in and trying to pick up the threads again. I used to think this was some sort of weird fickleness on my part, but I'm more inclined now to lump it together with narrative TV shows with continuous story arcs. Once I fall out of the narrative, it is really hard for me to get back in. Explains my terrible track record with book series too. I can do series where each book is basically just another adventure with a set of characters, but multiple books that tell one long tale? Major barrier for me. I would like to be able to read some of those, but I know that if I don't read them back-to-back-to-back (which, honestly, I'm far less likely to do than I am to binge watch a whole season of a TV show), I am probably not going to be able to keep the whole story in my head. Alas. I'm more than happy to wait for most TV shows to be over (or well into their run) before I watch so I can see all or most of it at once. But my trouble getting through book series *does* bother me, as there are several I would quite like to read. 

So while I'm over here agonizing about what to do in October when Arrow's season 7 begins airing (watch it a week at a time, knowing this might make me less likely to love it? save up two or three eps to watch in one go? wait til *gasp* the whole thing is out and risk being spoiled?), tell me about your relationship with serialized narratives. Can you watch your TV one episode at a time? How do you fare with book series?

*Of those I have seen. I'm seven eps into season 6 right now, and so far I am... perplexed. Though that is pretty much how I was feeling about season 5 at this point in the season, and I loved S5 to torturous little bits by the time it was over, so. We'll see.

Wee Narrative Knots I Can't Untangle

Most of the time when I come across something in a novel or TV show/movie that just... doesn't make sense, I crinkle my nose at it and move on. But every once in a while these little errors stick in my mind and I can't seem to leave them alone. But why is it wrong? Why didn't someone catch it? Am I *missing* something? I think of these minor errors as narrative knots, and I just can't let go of the idea that there *must* be a way to unravel them that I haven't picked up on yet. Here are some of my favorites. 

But How Does He Not Know?: Harry Potter and Arrow 

In episode 17 of the fourth season of Arrow, Oliver says that someone is "not Voldemort," and then has this exchange with other members of the team:

Thea: [makes surprised noise]

Oliver: What?

Thea: Nothing. It’s just… well, it’s shocking that you know who Voldemort is.

Oliver: Well, I mean, I’m not immune to pop culture. I read a few of the Harry Potter books.

Diggle: Really? Was gonna bet Thea that you just saw the movies.

Oliver: There were movies? 

This little scene reads a lot like ones from season one where Oliver's missing knowledge about pop culture from the five years he was stranded on the island is played for laughs. But that can't be what's going on here, since all of the Harry Potter books and the first five movies were all out before Oliver got stranded (in the last third of 2007). So maybe it's just commentary on how Oliver doesn't seem like the kind of guy to know about HP? But Oliver would have been exactly the right age when the books were first coming out to have been into  them? Even if *he* wasn't, I do not buy for a second that an American kid of Oliver's background who was thirteen in 1998 (when the first novel was released in the US) could get through the next nine years of his life without knowing who Voldemort is. And to be unaware that there are movies? What? The "there were movies?" line feels dismissive more than confused or surprised, so maybe Oliver is kind of joking, like he's a book purist? Who refuses to acknowledge the existence of the movies? Which, okaaay? Or maybe this scene is an inside joke outside the narrative? I thought maybe this was a haha dig at Tom Felton (who played Draco in the HP movies), as he joined the cast of Arrow's "sister" show The Flash, but Felton joined The Flash in the TV season after the season in which this episode appeared, so? I give up.

But He's Just Little?: Pippin's Presence in Early LotR

In chapter two of The Fellowship of the Ring, we're told that Frodo lived alone but had lots of friends, "especially among the younger hobbits... who had as children been fond of Bilbo and often in and out of Bag End. Folco Boffin and Fredegar Bolger were two of these; but his closest friends were Peregrin Took (usually called Pippin), and Merry Brandybuck (his real name was Meriadoc, but that was seldom remembered)."* This passage comes in the middle of an expository section about how Frodo spent his time between Bilbo's leaving the shire and Gandalf's return and the subsequent revelations about the ring and the beginning of Frodo's journey. We hear about Frodo's wanderings throughout this period, including how he went "tramping all over the Shire with them [Merry and Pippin]." After this description, the narrative goes on to say, "so it went on, until his forties were running out, and his fiftieth birthday was drawing near."** The progression of this description implies that Frodo was wandering with Pippin before his forties were running out. But the marker of Frodo's fiftieth birthday also tells us how much time has passed since Bilbo left (that is, seventeen years, as Frodo was thirty-three at Bilbo's party). So, it seems that Pippin has been hanging out with Frodo for something in the vicinity of seventeen years. Fine. Except. We find out later that Pippin, during the bulk of the narrative, during the attempt to get the ring to Mordor et cetera, is only twenty-nine years old. When a Gondorian tells Pippin that he looks like a child, "a lad of nine summers," Pippin responds, "Though you are not far wrong. I am still little more than a boy in the reckoning of my own people, and it will be four years yet before I 'come of age', as we say in the Shire."*** We know that hobbits come of age at thirty-three****, so Pippin must be twenty-nine (33 minus 4). If he is "little more than a boy" at twenty-nine, he must absolutely have been a child at twelve, the age he would have been seventeen years earlier, when he was, apparently, "tramping all over the Shire" with Frodo. Friends "among the younger hobbits," indeed. If we grant that Tolkien is not absolutely specific about when Pippin started hanging out with Frodo, I guess we can assume that Pippin started doing so somewhere in his early or mid-twenties, which makes things make a bit more sense. But that certainly isn't the impression the description gives. It sounds like Frodo is bacheloring around, keeping company with the young relatives he likes better than his fuddy-duddy peers, for seventeen years while Gandalf is off not finding things out as quickly as one might like wizarding. But surely an eleven-year-old kid is not old enough to be a friend to an adult, not in this sense of "we take long walking holidays all around the Shire." With this age difference, it would make more sense if Frodo had adopted Pippin, as Bilbo did Frodo. But that certainly is never implied. It's tangled up, you see? And this one is particularly strange because Tolkien was notorious for niggling over exactly these kinds of details to make sure they were right.

You Can Do What Now?: Brick and His Crutch in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the 1958 movie), Brick hurt himself and is walking with a crutch.***** His father, Big Daddy, tries to get Brick to talk about his alcoholism, and they have this exchange, during which Big Daddy takes away Brick's crutch and Brick falls:

Brick: This talk, it’s like all the others—it gets nowhere, nowhere! And it’s painful!

Big Daddy: [shoves Brick, who falls] All right, let it be painful! [takes Brick’s crutch away]

Brick: I can crawl on one foot and I can hop if I have to…

Big Daddy: If you're not careful, you're gonna crawl right out of this family.

Brick's last line, surely, is inside out? "I can hop on one foot and I can crawl if I have to" makes more sense, right? In that one doesn't crawl on one's feet? And in that hop-to-crawl would be progression toward the most desperate action within the sentence? And in that Big Daddy's next line picks up on "crawl" as if that's the last thing Brick said? But if Paul Newman got the line wrong, why didn't they do another take? Was this the best one they had (it *is* good)? And even if that was the case, they couldn't ADR the right line in? Did they not do ADR in 1958? My knowledge of film history definitely doesn't stretch to knowing that. Or maybe the line in the movie *is* correct? To demonstrate how distraught Brick is? I dunno. Every time I see this excellent, excellent film, this little curiosity tosses me out of it for a moment.

So those are my favorite narrative knots I'd love to untangle. What are yours? And do you see what I don't that might explain any of mine? 

*p. 41 of this edition of FotR

**p. 42

***p. 746 of this edition of RotK

****p. 21

*****This is a gross oversimplification of what's going on in this scene. If you've never seen this movie, do yourself a favor and go watch it. It's amazing.

Recommending Favorite Books to Favorite TV Characters

Here's a fun little game I like to play sometimes: which of my favorite books would I recommend to my favorite fictional characters? In this iteration, I'm imagining what I would suggest to some of my favorite TV characters, should I ever fall through my TV screen and have the opportunity to inflict my bookish opinions on them.

Father Brown (Father Brown): The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

Father Brown can't leave a mystery alone and is deeply invested in both his faith and in doing what is right in order to help people. The Sparrow, in the way it weaves together questions about faith and humanity with the mystery of what happened on a Jesuit-run first contact mission to another planet, should be irresistible to him. 

John Crichton (Farscape): The Princess Bride, William Goldman

Crichton comes slowly unhinged over the course of Farscape, but never (permanently) descends fully into madness. He learns to embrace the absurdity of his situations, often with good humor, and thus he should feel right at home with the tongue-in-cheek, postmodern adventure story of The Princess Bride. 

Phryne Fisher  (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries): Ms. Marvel, G. Willow Wilson

Phryne has no time for your prejudice, whatever its form, and she hasn't met a sticky situation she wouldn't jump into headfirst. I think she would follow the adventures of Kamala Khan and her transformation into Ms. Marvel with delight.

Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Poirot): Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

Frayn's play about Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, quantum mechanics, and war is so delightfully thinky without ever losing sight of the human cost of all the questions it brings up that I think Poirot would find himself and his little grey cells, perhaps surprisingly, enraptured by it.

Oliver Queen (Arrow): The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

So many of the big things LotR is *about* seem like they would resonate pretty strongly with Oliver and maybe, maaaaybe help him hold on to the slivers of hope he sometimes manages to find. The concept of "the long defeat," Gandalf's counsel against despair, and the Scouring of the Shire all seem like bits that would be heartbreakingly relevant to Oliver Queen.

Who are your favorite TV characters, and what would you tell them to read?

The Second One is *Definitely* a Gate to a Portal World

Well, space rats, I had a nice ol' blog post all planned out for today, but to tell you the truth it was not a little grumbly and contained more than a dash of Get Off My Lawn. And after supper I took a lovely stroll around the neighborhood with the Blonde Wonder, who spotted rabbits and braved trotting past an old armchair left for bulk collection tomorrow and "heck?"ed at a bird chirping on a wire, and I smelled the clover that grows all along the side of the road and marveled at some flowers and appreciated some golden dappled evening light. And after all that, I'm just not very grumbly anymore. So I leave you with a handful of pictures from our walk and wish you peace.

Maybe I'll share the cane-shakey post another time, but for now I give you a semi-rural southeast Virginia evening in June:

Fun Ways I've Seen Authors Interact with Readers

I've been to a lot of author events, readings and signings and the like, and they can be a fun, inspiring way to interact with favorite authors. I recently saw Madeline Miller give a reading and short talk and got to meet her briefly while she signed my copy of Circe. It was a lovely evening, and it got me thinking about other ways I've seen authors interacting with readers and fans. Here are a few that never fail to make me smile. 

Patreon Rewards
I see more and more authors starting Patreons so fans can support their work monetarily if they like, and while my feelings about that as a thing that published authors have to do are complicated, the support flowing toward the author and the engagement of the author with fans this allows warms my heart a bit, NGL. And many authors get nicely into the spirit of things, providing exciting and fun rewards for their Patreon supportors, like book swag and exclusive content like short stories in the world of their books. 

Engaging on Tumblr
A fair few authors post on Tumblr, but what I love is to see an author with an open ask box who periodically picks some questions to answer. This could be such a chore, and I can certainly see why an author might just keep that ask box closed even if they maintain a presence on the site, so it feels real nice to see authors thoughtfully answering reader questions and engaging with them. Whenever I see a fan tell an author how much they love their work and then the author is all genuine and pleased in response, it gets me right *there,* ya know? Two authors I know of who do this are Neil Gaiman and Diane Duane, should you want to check them out.


Signing Airport Bookstore Stock
This is perhaps my favorite of all the ways I've seen authors engage with fans, probably because it carries with it such potential for genuine surprise and delight for a lucky fan. I've never come across a signed book in an airport bookstore, but several of the authors I follow on Twitter frequently mention that they've signed all the copies of their latest book in the shop in Terminal Whichever at Such-and-Such Airport. And it makes me grin when I see those tweets. Some fan might pick up a book idly and have that little moment of "Oh!" when they see it's signed. Or! Imagine hanging out at your gate scrolling Twitter and seeing that one of your favorites has just finished signing copies in the very airport in which you sit! Such fun.

How do you see authors engaging with fans that hits you in the warm fuzzies?

Favorite Reads by Publication Year

In the back half of last year, it seems everyone I knew on LibraryThing was compiling a list of their favorite books published from each year of their life. I avoided making my own for a while, not because I disliked the idea (I love lists) but because I thought it would take a lot of doing. But eventually the excitement of putting together such a list was too much for me to resist, and I spent a delightful afternoon pouring over publication lists by year and marking out possibilities for each year of my life. The resulting list is below, with links to my reviews of those books where I have a review online. (Be aware that some of those reviews might be spoilery, though most of them probably indicate as such near the beginning of the review itself. The reviews are also presented "as is"--some of them are over ten years old, and I'm sure there are errors and bits I would do differently now. They form a snapshot of my life in the same way the list itself does, I suppose.) 

I intend to keep this list updated as the years continue to pass, perhaps revising some of the earlier years as I read more backlist. It's a fun way to envision a life. 

Are any of your favorites here? Which books would you choose?

1981—Early Autumn

1982—Howliday Inn

1983—A Solitary Blue

1984—Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders

1985—Lonesome Dove

1986—A Murder for Her Majesty

1987—Calvin and Hobbes

1988—Matilda

1989—Number the Stars

1990—Jurassic Park

1991—Heir to the Empire

1992—Textual Poachers: Television Fans and ParticipatoryCulture

1993—Trainspotting

1994—The Chamber

1995—The Courtship of Princess Leia

1996—The Sparrow

1997—Moab Is My Washpot

1998—About a Boy

1999—The Perks of Being a Wallflower

2000—J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

2001—Atonement

2002—The Midwife: A Memoir of Joy, Birth, and Hard Times

2003—The Namesake

2004—Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell

2005—Twilight

2006—The Thirteenth Tale

2007—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2008—Melusine

2009—1Q84

2010—Annabel

2011—The Song of Achilles

2012—Mrs Queen Takes the Train

2013—Fangirl

2014—Yes, Please!

2015—For Real

2016—The Nix

2017—The Tea Dragon Society

2018—All Out