More Book Lust

Yesterday, I finished Collection Development. Our final assignment was turned in and we gave our presentation. There are a few more presentations next week--I plan on bringing a thermos of rum with some eggnog or maybe coffee with Kahlua.

Today I finished my genre advisory class with Nancy Pearl. Tear. We discussed science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy is probably the genre I am the most familiar with. As a young'n I read The Chronicles of Narnia (which I don't think hold up very well as an adult). Later in elementary school I read The Book of Three and then finished up The Chronicles of Prydain. In junior high I started The Belgariad by David Eddings and then continued with The Malloreon. After that I read most of the Shannara books by Terry Brooks. During this time the Harry Potter books were coming out as well (I don't really care for the last three). In ninth grade my English class read The Hobbit, and in high school I read The Lord of the Rings as the movies were coming out. In high school and college I mostly left fantasy behind as I read more "literary" books. I say "literary" because readers' advisory is not about being an English critic; it's about matching books with readers. (So hard!) At the end of college I started reading the His Dark Materials trilogy. And the summer before grad school I read Little, Big which I'll talk about in just a minute.

For fantasy I read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which I've already discussed. Here is my annotation: "Richard Mayhew is an unlikely hero whose ordinary life has left him unprepared to deal with the shadowy underbelly of London--a dangerous subterranean world that exists beneath the gaps of the city."

I haven't read all that much science fiction. I do seem to watch a lot of sci-fi movies and TV shows though. Science fiction are often novels of ideas, which make them ripe for discussion. I really enjoyed reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, once I got going, though I couldn't really tell you why except that it's a Philip K. Dick novel. I do look forward to watching Blade Runner. Here's my annotation: "Before there were Cylons, there were Androids, and Rick Deckard retired them for a bounty. As he hunts down the latest model, he must confront his own ideas of empathy, morality, and what it means to be human."

And then I book talked Little, Big by John Crowley, which went pretty well if I say so myself. Here's basically what I said.

Imagine you are a stranger in your own life and to your own family. That is the fate of Smokey Barnable who knows his wife's family thinks they talk to faeries, but he doesn't believe a word of it.

Little, Big is the history of this singular family who live on the border of another realm. It is a secret history of America. And it is a very great love story.

In this novel the reader will:
visit Edgewood which is not to be found on any map
learn Brother North-Wind's secret
build a house made of memory
and discover the enigmatic plans of the faerie's parliament

With intricate design and dense, gorgeous prose, Crowley works his magic on us. I believe this is not a novel to read once but to get lost in over and over. Ursula Le Guin warns "Persons who enter this book are advised that they will leave it a different size than when they came in."

So you should all go buy and read Little, Big which was actually out-of-print for a while. In terms of the best fiction written in the last fifty years, this is near the top of my list.

To finish this whole thing I want to reproduce some of Roz Kaveney's thoughts about genre. This is from a review of Little, Big called "Wit and Terror" that was published in Books and Bookmen:

"Fiction consoles, but it also disturbs, awakes unease. There are questions that have to continually be asked and fiction is one of the best ways to pose them; not least because, truthfully, its answers have to provisional and conditional. The genre and subdivisions of the novel have their obsessional questions and their usual answers; one way of judging the basic seriousness of a piece of genre fiction has to do not so much with the originality of its solutions as with the strenuousness of the efforts it takes to come to the standard ones. The thriller for example has its traditional great Matters—for example, the questions “Can a just man be nurtured by a fundamentally unjust society? Nurtured thus, can he build justice within it?” The regular answer of the thriller is yes; the best thrillers show the price the avenger has to pay as being more than a sap across the back of the ear or a bullet through the windscreen. The campus novel has its conflict of abstract knowledge and institutional power; the novel of life among the urban intelligentsia has its search for balance between sexual equality and sexual justice; so-called hard science fiction has its demonstration that by natural grace and scientific ingenuity you can escape the deaths the universe has in store.

"And the fantasy novel? Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world’s pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages it landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people: it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking is you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist—the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power, and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of a kind and ordinary life."

(Two more weeks. Two more classes. The end is in sight.)