Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
The SF meme
I’m up at 1:43 AM, can’t sleep, which tells you a lot. Tells me a lot, anyway.
From Jon Hansen’s blog:
“Behold, the SF Book Club’s list of The 50 Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books, 1953-2002. And no list like that can go without someone somewhere turning it into a meme. Shocking, this internet.
So, the rules: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.”
Follow me below the cut . . .
High school English
You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
Suisan’s reminiscences about her schooling in English made me think about my high school English teachers. I owe them a lot, those gals. I credit them with teaching me to write, a skill which paid off big time in college. It’s frightening how few college students know how to write a coherent paragraph (let alone a coherent essay), particularly during timed final exams. I’m sure many of my As had more to do with the quality of my grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence variety, rhythm, and clarity, than with the quality of my ideas.
I don’t remember much about my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Baca. At the time, I thought she looked like Liz Taylor. I think she made us do one of those idiotic assignments where you write up your dreams for the future at the beginning of the year, do it again at the end of the year, then compare the two to see how far you’ve come. I doubt I came very far*.
We read The Old Man and the Sea that year. I hated it. I still hate it. I’m going to make Jake read it this year so that he can hate it, too. (See, Suisan? I didn’t learn anything from your post.) Seriously, though, what am I supposed to do about exposing Jake to Hemingway? I’m tempted to have him read The Best of Bad Hemingway and call that his Hemingway experience**.
But I digress.
Finally
Re: La Gabaldon’s sex scenes. Finally, on page 436, she ceases to be anemic:
He spread my thighs with his knee and sheathed himself to the root in a single thrust that made me gasp. He made a sound that was almost a groan, and gripped me tighter.
. . .
“Aye, I mean to use ye hard, my Sassenach,” he whispered. “I want to own you, to possess you, body and soul.” I struggled slightly and he pressed me down, hammering me, a solid, inexorable pounding that reached my womb with each stroke.
If I hadn’t seen the photo of La Gabaldon on the inside back cover, I’d have sworn a man wrote this passage. It’s so, so hormonal. Root-sheathing? Womb-pounding?
Ow. I don’t even have a womb, but I can imagine. OW. Dammit, Jamie, you could knock an ovary fucking Claire like that.
I wish I had more for y’all, but that passage left me in a post-coital stupor. So let’s open it up to discussion:
Does your feline prefer to be coddled with slow, gentle strokes, or would she rather be pounded senseless by some git in a tartan? Or perhaps she’d prefer to curl herself around a Hitachi Magic Wand.
Oops. No AC current in the 17th Century. Sorry, Claire.
D.
What do women want?
So I figured I’d better write a Smart Bitches Day post or Miss Beth will forget all about me. So here goes.
What do women want?
Ruminations apropos of Outlander
How many of y’all have recommended Outlander to me? And how many have told me how very very much they loooooove Jamie? I’ve lost track. And while I am not in the dating game, I’m still not so dead between the legs as to not obsess over What Women Want.
Trouble is, I’m clueless. I still don’t understand what you gals see in Hugh Jackman, and despite the Paul Newman fans who responded to this old post, in my own informal polling, Robert Redford still has Newman beat 2:1, much to my consternation. What is it about Redford? He’s so . . . so . . . so corrugated.
Growing up, I soon figured out that women wanted guys who were taller, meaner, scummier, taller, and taller than me. In that order. I kept wondering, Why do women fall for scum? but I should have been asking, Why am I attracted to women who fall for scum?
But then I graduated Elementary School and everything changed.
Back to Outlander. (Can you tell this is not going to be one of my more coherent SBDs?) Um . . .
SPOILERS
Which is kind of a ridiculous warning considering how many of you have committed this book to memory. NO, I am not going to trash your precious Outlander. I’m enjoying it. Really, I am. Even if I can’t tell when the characters are having sex because Gabaldon likes to play coy about such things, damn her.
Suck his cock already, wench — oh, whoops. You just did. And now he’s going down on you, or maybe you’re giving each other back rubs because DAMN IT I CAN’T TELL!
I think it’s a guy thing. I don’t do well with understated sex scenes.
So why do women love Jamie so much? Is it the kilt with the badger skin sporran? Of course not. I’m not dense, I know what it is.
He’s gallant. He takes punishment intended for that teenage girl and he has no expectation of reward. He got the skin whipped off his back and he didn’t even whimper about it. And he’s willing to give his life for Claire.
And then there are the physical characteristics. He’s a big motherfucker — I think Claire comes up to his bellybutton — not an effete, hairless, slender dude like her husband-from-the-future (present?), who slips from the reader’s (and Claire’s) memory as soon as she plummets back in time. In contrast, Jamie is a Manly Manâ„¢.
He’s a virgin, too, so Claire doesn’t have to worry about that narsty-assed 17th century syphilis. And he’s kind and considerate, an all-around sweetie.
Okay, that’s what women want in their fictional men; but what about real life? I’m curious about your bare minimum requirements. If the gallantry were there, how much slack would you cut a man with regard to physique? And if he were built like Jamie, how much slack would you cut him for a lack of gallantry?
You know, I’ve changed my mind. Forget gallantry and Manly Manlinessâ„¢. I think it is the kilt.
D.
Interview: Tamara Siler Jones (part 2)
So you’ve ordered Valley of the Soul and you don’t know what to do until it arrives? Keep reading.
Interview: Tamara Siler Jones (part 1)
Don’t forget the contest to win a signed copy of Valley.
Halloween brings us the release of Tamara Siler Jones‘ third forensic fantasy, Valley of the Soul (available from Amazon, or — buy blue! — Barnes and Noble). For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Tam’s stories focus on Dubric Byerly, the Castellan (think Chief of Police) of Faldorrah. Dubric’s task is to keep the people safe. For Dubric, failure carries a special sting: he’s haunted by the ghosts of murder victims whose killers have not been brought to justice.
In the first novel, Ghosts in the Snow (reviewed here), Dubric and his staff face a killer of young women. In Jones’ second novel, Threads of Malice (reviewed here), sexual abuse and murder pose an even more twisted threat to the Castellan’s team.This time around, ritualistically slaughtered animals begin appearing in Faldorrah. Prank or something far more ominous? I’ll give you one guess.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the neat things about Jones’ novels is that each is self-contained. You needn’t read them in sequence (and I didn’t).
On to the interview!
Contest: win a signed copy of Valley of the Soul
Halloween will soon be here*, and with it the release of Tamara Siler Jones’ third forensic fantasy, Valley of the Soul. I’ll be interviewing Tam tomorrow and Wednesday, so stay tuned.
But you’re wondering how you can win a signed copy, right? Here are the rules:
1. Between now and Friday, post a true-life scary story on your blog. Doesn’t have to be supernatural, and I guess it doesn’t even have to be true (like I’m going to check your facts?) But, damn it, try to creep us out.
2. To qualify, you’ll need to link back to this contest post and link to Valley‘s page either at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
3. I will post a link back to your site at the bottom of this post, and (of course) I will be hyping this contest all week.
4. In the comments, let me know when your post is up.
5. I’ll choose a winner by drawing and announce the name this Saturday.
Tam has a contest of her own, too!
D.
*OMG. Check out Lyn Cash’s kitty litter cake. Oy.
SBD: Boys Need Romance
My son has kindly posed for today’s Smart Bitches Day post, but he urges me to tell my readers that he is NOT reading this romance, he is only pretending to do so to make his father happy.
Oh, well. His loss. He’ll miss all the hot sex scenes.
I’m not the kind of guy who obsesses over his past, looking back a week, a month, or twenty years, putting each and every conflict and conversation under a microscope, second-guessing himself, anguishing over mistakes made, paths not taken. That’s just not me.
Much.
Aaack. Who am I kidding? I regret things I did in dreams. When I was five. If I could remember my dirty diapers, I’d probably regret those, too. If only I had held it in a little longer.
When you obsess over the past, sometimes you manage to figure a few things out, but then again, sometimes you spin your wheels for decades. Does any of this help? Maybe. If it keeps you from effing up your life in the present, then yes, it helps.
Recently I had the thought, If only I had read romance in Junior High. Romance could have transformed my adolescence, could have saved me from missed opportunities and botched relationships. But, no. I was reading Robert Heinlein, whose idea of romance went something like this:
Middle-aged male protagonist surrounds himself with beautiful women who hang upon his every word and give him all the sex a man of his brilliance deserves.
Heinlein’s male characters did not model good courting behavior. (I have strong suspicions that most male SF writers of the 60s and 70s were virgins or had to pay for it.) My brother, father, and friends were all atrocious models, too. I needed something different.
I needed Romance.
The B&WR of the NYTBR
I’ve had less that than four hours’ sleep each night for the past four nights. The muse needs her rest. Still, if you bear with me, I have one interesting tidbit below.
I have a point in here somewhere. Something about how to right write a good book review. Yeah, that’s it.
12:30 pm Wednesday: I caught those two errors above . . . I don’t dare read the rest of this post!
***
The Balls and Walnuts Review
of
The New York Times Book Review (September 24, 2006)
There are good book reviews and there are bad book reviews. I can’t explain well the difference, but I know what I like.
Take Terrence Rafferty’s review of David Long’s The Inhabited World, a novel of self-examination told by the ghost of a suicide. Not my cuppa, but Rafferty thinks The Inhabited World “is a terrific novel,” and so it’s Rafferty’s job to prove it to me.
Prove it, Mr. Rafferty.
SBD: Woof
For today’s Smart Bitches Day post, I ask the question: what’s up with all the dogs?
A friend and I were getting into it the other day. Or rather, I was getting into it, and she was egging me on. She told me Janet Evanovich had a dog in her stories, and I had that very morning been placed into a tizzy by Jennifer Crusie’s needless introduction of a dog in Welcome to Temptation.
This person went to the bother of assembling a partial list of critter characters. Here’s the Crusie portion of the list:
Crusie, Jennifer – Anyone But You (Fred the Basset hound)
Crusie, Jennifer – Crazy For You (Katie the dog)
Crusie, Jennifer – Getting Rid of Bradley (dog)
Crusie, Jennifer – The Cinderella Deal (Liz the cat)
Crusie, Jennifer – What the Lady Wants (Bob the dog)
and she left out Welcome to Temptation! This dog (in WtT), I’m talking serious left field. As if a light bulb suddenly flickered in Crusie’s brain: “Need . . . more . . . comic relief!”
Listen:
Something furry brushed her leg and she looked down and screamed.
There was an animal there–a big one, it came halfway up to her knee–and it had matted red-brown fur on its barrel-like body and short white legs with little black spots on them, and Sophie had never seen anything like it in her life.
I didn’t mind the dog in Crazy for You. That dog was instrumental to the plot; Crusie couldn’t tell Crazy for You without Katie the Dog.
I remember liking Kate’s dog, but I read Somebody Wonderful very early in my romance-reading life. Would I still like the ugly mutt as much today?
Botty must have heard his steps. The scruffy little mutt came careening down the stairs, a misshapen cannonball of a dog. He’d lurked up in the the top floor, probably hiding from the widow.
Mick put down the full basin and bent to scratch the dog’s remaining ear. Botty pushed at his hand with ecstatic wheezing growls.
Kate, you had me at “remaining ear,” and you cinched the deal with “wheezing growls.” Okay, I still love Botty. In a literary universe of ugly mutts, Botty out-uglies all of ’em. Botty is Teh Mutt.
But, what are they doing here, these dogs? Is it a “Must Love Dogs” kinda thing? I hope not, because that movie sucked. Suhhhcked. And the dog in that movie was named Mother Theresa — that’s what I call really reaching for a laugh.
I can understand giving your hero a dog, especially if said hero is the gruff silent type. Gotta show he has a heart, he’s capable of love. And if he can love a flatulent*, one-eared mutt, he’s bound to love our heroine.
But why do Crusie’s heroines need dogs? Except in Crazy for You, of course. That dog made sense.
I admit to placing a cat in my romance, and yes, he’s the heroine’s cat, but he’s only there to pounce on my hero’s balls in the middle of the night. I never bothered to turn the cat into a character. Was that a mistake?
Yes, I know: I have more questions than answers, but You Who Are Wise in this genre will, I’m sure, educate me.
D.
*I don’t remember for certain if Botty was flatulent, but Kate went out of her way to make him disagreeable. If he wasn’t flatulent, he should have been.