As the summer winds to a close (both the college I work at and the school my daughter attends started their academic year today), I find myself reflecting on the genre reading that I have done this summer. The following observations came to mind:
- We have been reading the first Harry Potter novel out loud as a family. My wife does most of the reading because she has a theater background and is excellent at reading with intonation and pacing and doing (but not overdoing) voices. I resisted the novels for a long time, but finally read them in the mid-2000s. I enjoyed them, but felt like they were very overrated. I was one of those the Taran books are better or the Dark is Rising series is so much more interesting, etc. snobs. I still am, but hearing them out loud and witnessing my 9yo daughter experience the first book, has modified my opinion. In my previous reading, I had come to the opinion that J.K. Rowling can write vivid, interesting characters. The series teems with them. But this time around, I realized that these things are also true novels — shaggy, polyphonic, dramatic works. It is their inherent novel-ness, in my opinion, that has made them such a success.
- Last August, I reacted to the second novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series by appreciating the portrait of a marriage found in Glamour in Glass. Now after reading Without a Summer, the third entry in the series, I’m finding that that not only continues, but that I’m beginning to think that Vincent is an intriguing model for masculinity (and for male characters in genre fiction).
- Both Elizabeth Bear’s Shattered Pillars and Ken Scholes’ Requiem use the narrative method of switching between multiple points of view within a single chapter. Each POV section is one to four or so pages in length. Many are just 500-1,000 words. It’s a tricky thing to pull off because it means the author has to juggle multiple timelines and character and plot arcs, but I really like the effect. It means that we aren’t apart from each of the POV characters for too long, and it quickens the overall pace of the novel. The key thing that makes this work for both Bear and Scholes, however, is their use of a more poetic (but not lofty or mannered) language than is often found in epic fantasy. Each POV section has the elegance of a short story.
- If Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves isn’t short-listed for the Pulitzer, I will be very cranky.
- I know that you can say this about almost any good story, but I think that Saladin Ahmed’s “Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride” would make a great film. And it would be fairly inexpensive to produce. I’m not a filmmaker, but if I were, I’d be putting together a pitch letter for Ahmed’s agent right now. You can find that story in his collection Engraved on the Eye, which can currently be downloaded for free.
