Holiday Reading

When the nights are dark and cold, there’s nothing like curling up in a comfy chair, next to a warm fire, with a good book.

Few of us have wood fires these days (though I happen to be sitting beside one at the moment), and in any case there are air pollution issues, but I find I can achieve something almost as good with ducted heating, a few candles, a nice reading lamp with a full-spectrum bulb, and some Christmas lights twinkling on the tree or around the window.

(If the smell of wood smoke is vital for you, you can always get one of those small Hibachis and burn a few pine chips, but make sure your smoke alarms are turned off first if you are going to burn more than two or three.  Or you can get a piney smell by draping a few branches and garlands around the room. I have been known to bring home fresh cut pine when I come across it for the aroma.)

And here are some suggestions for Christmas-themed reading—and a few books, as well, that I think go well with a warm chair in the dark nights:

A Christmas Carol—Charles Dickins — The classic story, which so many people know without having read it.  And it is worth reading (and seeing in a live theatrical production). [on Amazon; ebook version]

The Night Before Christmas — Many of us can recite this poem (by Clement Clarke Moore) by heart, but it helps to have a nicely illustrated version to read aloud on Christmas Eve, and the illustrations in this one, by Charles Santore, are lavish and appealing, albeit very much the expected, traditional thing. [on Amazon]

How the Grinch Stole Christmas—Dr. Seuss — Yet another classic Christmas text we all know by heart, but I suspect many people know it mostly from the original animated TV version, which is charming and terrific, but shouldn’t supplant the original. [on Amazon]

Olive, The Other Reindeer—Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Seibold — The newest edition to the canon of Christmas classics, at least for me—I found it utterly enchanting, first in book form and then in the TV special, with Drew Barrymore doing the voice of a dog named Olive who thinks she’s the other reindeer from the line in the song, “all of [Olive] the other reindeer.” [on Amazon – the ebook is free if you have Kindle Unlimited]

Miracle and Other Christmas Stories—Connie Willis — Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Connie Willis reimagines some of the key themes of Christmas in this collection of warm and generous stories. [on Amazon]

Doomsday Book—Connie Willis — Set in Oxford of the future, when time travel is a research tool for history departments, and in Oxford of the 1300s, when plague stalked the land. It’s a phenomenal read, deeply moving in places, and set during Christmas. An excellent book for curling up with on a winter evening. [on Amazon]

Hogfather—Terry Pratchett — “Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”  Sir Terry Pratchett has been called the greatest living satirist writing in English.  Here he turns his satirical, but also always warm and generous, wit loose on Christmas (among other things). [on Amazon]

The Riverside Shakespeare — Shakespeare is always readable, and I’ve spent many a winter’s night curled up with one or another play. “A Winter’s Tale” might seem like the seasonal reading, but I’d suggest giving it a miss. It’s one of the problem plays and doesn’t really have much to offer of a seasonally appropriate nature. Paradoxically, the play I might most recommend for reading during the long nights around the winter solstice is… “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Its magic, mystery and wonder seem much in keeping with the season, and of course it’s delightful.  [on Amazon]

The Lord of the Rings — Not at all holiday themed, but a book I’ve been curling up with during winters for more years than I care to reveal. Again, as with the Shakespeare, there is something about the mood that it summons in you as you read that does seem to consort well with the mood of the holidays, even when the content has nothing at all to do with Christmas or the holidays. [on Amazon]

In the past I would have included the YA fantasy series by she who must not be named. Not any more. But if you have them and they were special to you, they have nice Christmas scenes in them.

A newer addition to my holiday reading is Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising which I was turned on to by a social media post by Rob Macfarlane maybe 5 years ago, when he was proposing a winter solstice read. That led to Rob adapting the book as a radio play — which will be broadcast by the BBC in 12 parts beginning on 20 December. I’m very much looking forward to it, and am foregoing my annual read in anticipation. [book on Amazon]

If you are looking for any of these books, or for books as gifts for people you love for the holidays, please shop at independent bookshops as much as possible. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, try Green Apple Books, Booksmith or Borderlands in San Francisco, or Moe’s Books or Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley. They will also ship to you wherever you are.

You can also order from Powell’s Books in Portland, and Book Riot has a handy list of independent bookshops around the country from which you can order online. And if you are in the UK you can support independent bookshops by buying online with Bookshop.org

Filed under: What I Read Today, books, Christmas, eBooks, holidays

What I Read Today: Tasty quotes on our online life

Two tasty quotes concerning our online life:

“have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame.”

Rule 34 by Charles Stross

We have information fatigue, anxiety, and glut. We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.

What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier by James Gleick

Filed under: What I Read Today, internet, science, science fiction, technology, teh interwebz

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse (update)

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse:

Science is completely entangled with capital and capitalism. It is simultaneously the source of some threats (such as the ecological consequences of our industries or the uncontrolled use of genetic engineering), and our best hope of understanding those threats and finding a way to cope with them…

read the full discussion with “the most dangerous philosopher in the west” in the current New Scientist. (sadly, now behind a pay wall – why you need to get it while the getting is good)

Once again, serendipity – coincidence – connection – running across this while reading about the same issues, talked about in somewhat similar ways, in Sixty Days and Counting, the final volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” series. Beyond that, though, Žižek’s comments are provocative and interesting and worth a read.

Filed under: What I Read Today, climate change, science fiction

Reading and Coincidence/Connection

I’m not sure what to make of this, but this past week, whatever I’ve been reading – or rather the fiction reading I’ve been doing for fun – has seemed to connect up with stuff I’ve come across in the course of my other work and what I think of as my “info-slog” – my daily attempt to work through what I think of as the more interesting and important websites and blogs and feeds.

This week, for instance, I’m rereading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” series (in part as a response to finishing his Galileo’s Dream), and tonight I was on the second book, Fifty Degrees Below, and had just read about the protagonist, Frank Vanderwal, learning that he is under government surveillance, and that they might activate GPS tracking on his van. And then I ran across this in one of my feeds:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go.

via The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS – TIME.

The “Science in the Capital” series in part concerns the plight of Khembalung, a country of Tibetan refugees living on an island in the delta of the Ganges threatened by rising sea levels. The country is working with the “League of Drowning Nations”… and just now, I ran across a design for an “Embassy of Drowned Nations:

Embassy of Drowned Nations: Floating City for Rising Tide Victims | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World

I guess given that a large percentage of my info-slog is focused on issues of climate change, this latter is less of a coincidence. But still… interesting. And it points to how right on and relevant the “Science in the Capital” series is.

Filed under: What I Read Today, climate change, science fiction

Seven Secret Lives

I’ve just finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent book, Galileo’s Dream. It’s many things – including a very satisfying historical novel, and an attempt to grapple with the role of science in society. In this latter, it is part of a project that Robinson has been engaged in for a long time – through the Mars Trilogy and the more recent “Science in the Capital” series (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, and perhaps Antarctica as well.)

It’s a profound issue, and Robinson also makes a compelling case in these books for its vital importance – in particular as a way to confront and confound the processes of what he once called “Götterdämmerung capitalism” that are behind climate change/global warming as well as much of the poverty and misery that still torments the world, despite our enormous technical and scientific achievements and the immense wealth and power humanity has at its disposal.

But while Robinson is a great “big picture” writer, a writer of ideas and often of an epic scope, what makes him such a rewarding and poweful writer, so pleasurable to read, is his humanity, and his grounding in the lives and feelings of his characters. How alive Galileo becomes for us reading this book (and also how like Sax from the Mars books).

And there are moments when Robinson is just writing about what it means to be human, to be alive, when he strikes a real chord with me – when, like Galileo, I feel as if I am a bell that has been rung:

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone. (p. 280)

Filed under: What I Read Today, science fiction

What I Read Today: “Silver Linings”

I’ve downloaded and read a dozen short stories from Tor.com over the last week. My favorites so far have probably been the two by Charles Stross, whose “Laundry” series (eg, this) and novel Halting State I really, really like. But this one was great, by an author whose name I’ve seen around a lot lately but had never read before.

Silver Linings by Tim Pratt and Thom Tenery.

Cloudmining is a rough business at the best of times, mostly because everyone on the ground wants to kill you, but I had more particular problems…

(via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy.)

Filed under: Literature, What I Read Today, science fiction

What I Read Today: on “Valences of the Dialectic” by Fredric Jameson

London Review of Books

Benjamin Kunkel · “Into the Big Tent”:

During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an era of deregulation, financialisation, industrial decline, demoralisation of the working class, the collapse of Communism and so on – it often seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous contradictions of capitalism, and no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction. (via LRB)

Filed under: Cultural Studies, What I Read Today, theory

BLDGBLOG: The Switching Labyrinth

The Switching Labyrinth: “Sam McElhinney, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, has been building full-scale labyrinths in London and testing people’s spatial reactions to them.”

(via BLDGBLOG.)

A fascinating read, generally, but particularly if you spend any time thinking about how people interact with the built environment.

Filed under: What I Read Today, Architecture, design, urbanismo

Mark Dery on Lady Gaga

Is Lady Gaga dumb? This is the question that Mark Dery ponders, as only Dery can, in his latest True/Slant essay: “Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back: On Lady Gaga.” The point-of-entry is a New Yorker essay from last year by music critic Sasha Frere-Jones in which he raised the eternal inquiry, “How not dumb is Gaga?” Dery’s answer may not not surprise you.

via Mark Dery on Lady Gaga – Boing Boing.

Filed under: What I Read Today, music