Sacred Cheese of Life

I'm in another Murderbot reread. Happens several times a year. But it got me thinking why we love Murderbot so much. What is it about a depressive angry ex-slave cyborg with PTSD who's on the run that gets to us? It doesn't know itself. It doesn't know what it wants. It's angry, justifiably so. It wants to be part of a team, to belong, and to connect with others, but doesn't know that and would de...

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best books ever. It gets into everything good: how to transition from a complacent child to a self-aware person, what it means to be a writer, who we write for and how it affects them and us, what it means to be aware of your own emotional state and how to articulate and manage that. Did you think this book was about a kid with a spy route who peere...

Stella Gibbons's amazing novel Cold Comfort Farm features a main character without a real character art of her own, who walks into the lives of her messy dramatic cousins and solves all their major life problems. Flora Poste said from the beginning she liked cleaning up messes and making everything tidy and that's exactly what she does with the Starkadders. They are living with maximum misery and...

William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" is widely taught because it's such a fascinating and complex collection of literary maneuvers in a small space. We get the story of Emily Grierson, an upper class social exile who does some very weird things. Obviously I wanted to read it after We Have Always Lived in the Castle due to the major overlaps. But this story also features an unreliable...

Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle raises questions like: what if my little sister was a murderous psychopath? And: how burned down does a house have to be before we’ll move out? And: Why do the villagers hate our family so much? The last question is because of the first one, really. Merricat poisoned most of her family and killed them. It’s not even really clear why. Becau...

I adore this book, then I got all mad at the ending, then when I went over it again, I had misread it—the ending is exactly right. Hurray! Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is overtly a retelling of Pride and Prejudice except instead of being about either of those things, it’s about genteel poverty and what it’s okay to do to get out of it. The poverty is no joke in this book. Get ready to apprec...

Melina Marchetta’s novel Jellicoe Road will kill you dead, in a good way, but you only get to read it unspoiled ONCE, so please I am begging you, read it before you listen to this! I will ruin everything for you. This is one of the best books there is. Go read it now. Hup hup. Okay! Jellicoe Road is the story of Taylor Markham trying to fix her past and her present, her family and her friends, whi...

This is a little bit different as an approach. I decided to record while watching Jupiter Ascending , which made for slightly odd audio, though I turned the tv down a few minutes in. But it also meant a lot of silences, so I ran truncate silence, which rendered everything like an ADHD nightmare of jumping from one thought to another. Whee! It was fun to listen to, though. Just be aware. I really l...

Farscape is an absolute delight of a show. Space opera at its best. I wanted to study it for space opera for Becca’s favorite show. Ultimately I talked myself out of it through this discussion and ended up thinking it should be a dystopia of some kind, possibly a dystopian space opera, if there is such a thing. There’s a lot of talk about the Becca book in this. I’m figuring some stuff out. I wish...

Joan Aiken uses landscape to encompass and embody the stories she tells—sometimes. When she does it, I find the novels incredibly compelling. It’s odd that she doesn’t always do it, though, come to think of it. I want to use landscape that way. I’m impatient with fuzzy going nowhere stories, or rather one, anyway. I decided every location (or scene) has to be doing three things. Location and lands...

I just watched the three hour miniseries for this. I have SUCH a complicated relationship with this show! We’ll get into it, don’t worry. I’m interested in what worked so well in this miniseries and what drove such obsession with the show in general. I was truly obsessed and it changed the course of my life for the better all kinds of ways. I had so many cool experiences that I never would have ha...

This week I'm reading the amazing novel I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. Please read it before listening!  This novel is so upsetting. And I remembered it very differently from the way it actually is. I didn't understand it fully when I read it as a child, no surprise there. It's a complex narrative method on multiple levels, not just that it's alternating interview transcripts and direct n...

Kind of a departure this week. I listened to a whole long podcast series called Scamanda about a person who created a fictional situation for herself, lied about having cancer, and used that to bilk friends and family and strangers out of a lot of money. Thieves aren’t interesting, but this person wanted affection and caring and sympathy and a lot of help, and used her fake cancer diagnosis and tr...

Rimrunners is really super From The Past in a way that's kind of unpalatable now, a time when "tough heroine" meant "is like a dude hero from twenty years before." She's tough! She kills a would-be rapist guy with her bare hands (and bootheel) when starving to death! She murders a creepy molester guy slowly and camps out in his apartment! She doesn't have nerves of steel--she's a wreck--but that's...

That title has issues, but it’s a fantastic book. This is a middle grade novel by E.L. Konigsburg, one of my favorite middle grade authors—and we already know I adore middle grade. I think I have ten of her books. This is a book narrated by a funny, self-aware fifth-grade girl, Elizabeth, as she enters a new school and makes a friend, Jennifer, who turns out to be manipulative and controlling. Jen...

Florence Engel Randall’s novel follows a traumatized black teen who gets sent to live with a white suburban family in the early 70s. She didn’t want to go, nobody wants her there, and she has a bad time. She also will never say what’s bothering her or what’s wrong. Troubled teens as always lead to poltergeist activity. What a fantastic book! I loved it as a kid. It’s weird to read it as an adult....

The book I read is about a wealthy family in Scotland interacting with some Scottish Travellers and being Good and Right about things having to do with them and not Prejudiced and Bad and Mean. There’s a huge amount of unconsidered privilege that never gets addressed or resolved, even though that would have made a great story. The main character never develops at all. It’s all so weird. And she go...

This week I read the Thrushcross trilogy, Leaving Thrushcross, The Icarus Triptych, and Mazewood. And yeah, I wrote them, but I also have no memory, so things were startlingly new to me, which I agree is weird. But that gave me the idea to talk about objective reading and how we desperately need it to be able to rewrite our work. I vividly remember being unable to do this. It was not that long ago...

Laini Taylor’s novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone is the first in a trilogy that will knock your socks off. Read it! Read it before you listen to this! There are SECRETS that I will give away and ruin things for you, oh no! It’s a series that is literary high fantasy science fiction young adult romance. This series has everything! There are a few things I’d do differently, but Taylor is brilliant at...

Justine Larbalestier’s Liar , at last! This is such a good novel. You have to read it before you listen, though. I will RUIN it for you by spoiling every possible thing. This is a book you have to experience unspoiled! You only get one chance. So please go read before you listen. I usually take five class meetings to discuss this novel, so I talked really fast and didn’t get to say most of what I...

Oh boy, I keep seeing people wish they could write novels but don’t know how, or where to start, or what to do, so here’s some advice about that. You do not need to know how to do this before you start. You need a person with a problem. And you need specificity: what that person is like, their skills and weaknesses, their particular situation, plus the geographical location and things like time of...

This week I get into the strange linear narrative of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” not in the sort of high school New Critical way of x symbolizes y, but in the sense of episodic versus serial narrative structure. It’s a very strange story in a lot of ways because we have no idea where Phoenix Jackson is going or why she’s going there. And in fact when she arrives, she doesn’t know either. This st...

I look into Connie Willis's time travel novel Doomsday Book with suspension of disbelief toward the omniscient time travel machine that somehow knows whether there’s a contagion in the past that present people are immune to (seriously, come on) because it’s phenomenal ANYWAY. Amazing characters, a tight and complex plot, a pandemic before our real one happened, and a lot of questions about hope, d...

I talk about story vs plot with frequent reference to Hart Hanson’s novel The Seminarian since I read it yesterday and it’s extremely good. Also: the book fair, the 1800s sofa that made me feel like I was in fiction and dislocated my shoulder, finishing 40/40 one day soon we hope, what stories we tell without meaning to, and more.

This week I read Meg Cabot's delightful epistolary novel The Boy Next Door (it's entirely email) and discuss what makes modern epistolary different from the pen and paper days. I also finished that Summerlands novel draft (loud cheers) so published a collection of short stories, planned how to complete a book called 40/40, and started prepping another novel for publication. I can stop any time I w...