Reflections on the Nebula Award Winners 2011

The 2011 Nebula Award Winners were posted today. I thought I'd reflect on some of the winners. I am still working through the Hugo nominees, but I think I'll get through more of them by the time they are chosen than I did for the Nebulas!

It is confusing to me, because sometimes people claim that all nominees are the Nebula winners, but this list clearly names one-two winner(s) in each category. Hmmm.

Winner for short story - The Ellison didn't really stick with me, but I liked the Kij Johnson. I was probably most attached to the Vylar Kaftan story, but the Johnson was memorable with the sacrificial ponies. At least it wasn't alien rape this time around.

I unfortunately didn't get through many of the nominees for novella or novelette, but I remember Swirsky from a previous year and her mythological settings.

What I really can weigh in on is the best novel category. I enjoyed the Willis but I know a lot of people hate the inaccuracies. I was rather fond of the Okorafor, and just finished reading the Jemisin with the Sword and Laser book club, so that would have been fun to see win on some levels.

In the young adult category, there were some really strong contenders. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when books that are not first in a series are nominated since that seems par for the (arguably confused) course for the Hugos and Nebulas, but while I enjoyed the Pratchett, I would have gone with the Collins or Bacigalupi. I liked Ship Breaker more than The Windup Girl, which was given incredible acclaim last year. And The Hunger Games was so strong!

Just some late night thoughts. I'm not surprised Inception won but I'm kind of confused as to why there is a Nebula movie award. :)

The Tiffany Aching Books by Terry Pratchett

I Shall Wear Midnight (Tiffany Aching, #4) by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Tiffany Aching books are a subset of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, something that is still evolving and growing and branches off into many different tangents. I hadn't read any of them, despite the fact that so many of my friends whose reading opinions I value seem to really love them. You see, I equate Terry Pratchett in my mind with Douglas Adams, that somewhat fantastical lightly humorous writer, with the kind of humor where I say to myself, "Oh, clever you," but don't actually laugh. Anyway, Pratchett is quite similar to that, so I wasn't sure I was going to be interested in any of his universes.

I kept hearing about the Tiffany Aching books though, which can be read without necessarily understanding the Discworld universe. They start with The Wee Free Men, where Tiffany first discovers she is a witch and saves her little brother with a frying pan. She just has a knack for it, and is taken under a local witch's wing for mentoring, which really starts in the second book, A Hat Full of Sky. She strikes out for herself, including making a lot of mistakes, in Wintersmith (which is probably my favorite of the four), and we end up with her almost at adulthood by the last one, I Shall Wear Midnight.

What I like about these books:

• An interesting setting, even within the world of the books. Since Tiffany comes from "the chalk," she breaks a lot of the stereotypes that even the witches have.
• She has other interests. And she makes damn good cheese.
• The mundane nature of her work. It isn't all impressive scales and saving people. It is wiping bums and sheltering an abused wife. It reads as very realistic despite the magic. Which is kind of the point.
• The humor is tolerable. So is the pain. The reader gets access to what Tiffany feels, which she hides pretty successfully from her parents and from the people in the countryside.
• The wee free men. I have to admit that I was not won over by them until book 4, and they drove me to annoyance quite a bit until then.
  

I'm not sure even still that I would bother reading the rest of the Discworld books. Someone can tell me a good reason why. :)

Listening to Detectives

By default, I'm not much of an audio book person. I get distracted easily and realize I haven't been paying attention for the last five minutes, and it isn't always easy to go back! After trying several different genres, I have found that one genre that really works for me in audio form is detective novels - hard boiled, or fantasy.

Now, now, let me explain. I know you didn't expect to see the word fantasy in there, but I don't have a better way of explaining The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, that tell the story of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, the only wizard private investigator I've ever heard of. Add to that an excellent reading by James Marsters (ahem, Spike from Buffy), and I actually found myself carrying my iPad around with me in the mornings so I could listen to Storm Front (Dresden Files #1) on my Audible app while getting ready.

Even better than the Butcher was a book I downloaded through Overdrive, which one of my local public libraries gives their users access to. Elliott Gould played Detective Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, but also reads The Big Sleep in the audio book. His voice is perfect for the dry sarcasm and overly detailed descriptions of each female character's legs. This is prose that is best heard, not just read. Short sentences, constant analogies, just so great in audio form.

Nebula Award 2010 - Novel

I've been racing through some of the 2010 Nebula Award Nominees. I plan to give my take on most of the categories, but for today I want to talk about the novel nominees.

My absolute favorite of the bunch was Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. This is a brilliant combination of post-apocalypse and magic, set in a tribal Africa of the future. It was different, fresh, and I couldn't put it down.


The close second would be Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis. These chronicle time traveling historians during the Blitz, in London of World War II. These are more historical novel than science fiction, but I enjoyed learning, and really developed a deep attachment to the characters trying to find their way "home" to Oxford in 2060.

The rest of the books were mediocre for me, or maybe just not my favorite genres. I read at least 50 pages of each one. The one I finished, Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal, made me decide I didn't need to force myself to finish a book I wasn't enjoying. It was a weird combination of magic and regency romance, I wasn't really feeling it. Echo by Jack McDevitt just was kind of blase, not enough interesting stuff for a world of the 27th century! Native Star by M.K. Hobson and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemison fall into the category of fantasy novels I can't even pretend to care about. No offense to the authors, of course. Everyone has a niche.

Stay tuned for my slightly skewed views of the nominated short stories, novellas, novelettes, and YA novels.

Disagreeing with Award Winners

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ugh, really? This won the National Book Award over Nicole Krauss? Or even Peter Carey? I have to admit, I read the first 60 pages pretty closely and then decided to skim the rest. It is a very detailed account of a world I just couldn't make myself care about, apart from the occasional interesting tangent with Maggie, the girl with the wirey red hair. If it won the award because it had a unique setting, well, I guess aspiring authors can use that as their strategy. Because I just don't see any other merit to it.

View all my reviews

This is not the first time I have forced myself to finish a book because it had received great acclaim (Freedom, anyone?). I always start to doubt my literary prowess when this happens. Is it a matter of taste or am I not open enough? Do awards get given for reasons I don't understand? Should I force myself to figure out away to enjoy something I find excruciating?

Let's face it. I only read for fun. I can't help but push myself into reading outside my comfort zone, and don't usually regret it. Possibly only when reading books like this.

So who I think should have won the National Book Award? I would have given it to Great House or Room. I'm still going to read some of the non-fiction finalists, at least the winner, since I bought it a month ago. Eventually. Right now I'm reading the finalists for the 2010 Nebula Award, so expect some posts about those!

Reading Food and Guilt

I do read non-fiction from time to time, and often find myself steered toward books about food, since I bake and garden as hobbies, as well as being an adult convert to semi-vegetarianism. The reading experience for this genre of books varies, but often comes with a helping of guilt for me, and I imagine for most readers. In this blog post I will rate the book for how I liked it and how guilty it made me feel.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Rating: 5/5 stars
Guilt Rating: Well, this is a strange one. I think he does well in making you reconsider assumptions you may have made. Is it really about eating organic, or is eating local better for the environment? Is meat really bad? I did make the change of only buying vegetarian, cage-free, grain-fed eggs from that point forward, like my original review said.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

Rating: 5/5 stars
Guilt rating: Actually, low on guilt, but high on inspiration. She doesn't even begin to suggest that most families could/should do what her family did and live only on food available in a 100 mile radius. But I felt inspired to grow my own food, to learn about heirlooms, and to shop more locally, and I really have. Last year we gardened full throttle and still have a lot to learn, but the resources in this book really helped us get started.

Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats by Steve Ettlinger

Rating: 5/5 stars.
Guilt: Oh boy. I wasn't raised eating a lot of processed food, not even carbonated beverages except on special occasions. Ironically, becoming a vegetarian has increased my processed food consumption by leaps and bounds, what else is meat substitute made out of anyway? After reading this book, I still can't drink a Frappuccino. I just think "cotton makes this texture" the entire time. If you don't want to know, don't read this book. It was startling and disgusting but also kind of cool, if I'm being honest. Yay science.

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser

Rating: 5/5 stars
Guilt Factor: If you eat fast food, you might never again. McDonalds does have some tasty beverages, but after reading about their impact on potatoes and eggs and the dairy industry, and how egg consumption ends up in cows being treated, well, fast food becomes a rather tougher pill to swallow. He also shows how science gives you the impression of eating food when what you're eating is engineered nothingness. Fascinating but definitely high on guilt. That was his goal, I think. :)

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Rating: 3/5 stars, maybe because at this point I felt like I'd heard it all before
Guilt: Oh yeah. Except I'm immune, a bit, to hearing about factory farming when I already don't eat meat. I wish he'd spent more than his brief mentions talking about fish farms, since I think we get mixed messages about what fish we should buy - wild fish are said to be bad for the environment, but farmed fish don't sound very spectacular in his encounter. I just wish he'd had some solutions other than not eating animals at all.

Cod by Mark Kurlansky

Rating: 4/5 stars
Guilt: Well, you'll feel bad any time you eat fish, because they are practically endangered species!

I think it is interesting to note that Pollan followed The Omnivore's Dilemma with In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, a book that looks interesting but I haven't had time to read yet. I think he was potentially wanting to steer away from the guilt-food read too. Anything else I should be reading to balance it all out?

Why I Love Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I'm having a little blog identity crisis. So many people review each book they read, but I already do that over in GoodReads and don't want to repeat myself. Besides that, I like to write little blurby reviews, and blogs seem to demand a lot more of me. (If you read this, I'd like to know if you think posting individual book reviews both places is redundant).


On to the subject at hand - post-apocalyptic fiction. I am actually a pretty upbeat, optimistic person, but one of my favorite sub-genres of literature is full of death and destruction, bloating bodies and decay, war and sickness, and so on. But hold on - I specify post-apocalyptic because to me that refers to stories told about the "after." I love all the ideas that authors have come up with as to how society would be recreated once it is destroyed. It can be an interesting commentary on what really matters, what could arguably need to be disposed of anyway, and the danger of returning ourselves right back to where we were before. I know the line is slim sometimes between post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature, but then again, not really. Most post-apocalyptic fiction revolves around a specific event - it can be nuclear, it can be medical, it can be political, but definitely something that happened that can be pinpointed and marked with a before and after.

I wouldn't say I've read everything in this genre, but practically. I most recently finished The Stand by Stephen King. It often tops post-apocalyptic lists, but I was avoiding it because of a previous bad reading experience with him (Insomnia not being the best place to start). I finally buckled down and read it in a few days when I was home sick with a cold. Of course, since the virus in The Stand that kills almost everyone in the world manifests just like a cold, you could argue that this may not have been the best reading material. And I've had dreams inspired by the book every night since I started reading it. To me, that just speaks to how good it is. The characters are interesting, his descriptive power is obvious (to a fault, as I can still pretty much smell rotting bodies in my head, ugh), and the twist of the battle of good and evil makes for a slightly supernatural bent. I'm happy to take back what I said about King before, and say that this belongs on the list of the best of post-apocalyptic writing. I read the revised and expanded edition, but honestly it could have been even longer. I wanted to know more about what happened after the end.

So if The Stand is on my list, what else would be? I definitely have opinions on this.

First, a collection of short stories called The Wastelands, compiled and edited by John Joseph Adams. I was actually pointed toward this when I was the (lucky) librarian for a course called Apocalypse and Unrest in Contemporary Media, and it fueled the fire. Not only are the stories fantastic and varied, there is a great list in the back of post-apocalyptic novels that I added to my reading list. The stories that have stuck with me even two years later are Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels by George R. R. Martin and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow. Not to mention the ending of Bread and Bombs by M. Rickert.

Short stories are a great way to explore an idea, but they lack the world development that I enjoy so much in the longer form of a novel. My favorites include Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which has a fascinating story of a woman who ends up leading a new religion in the aftermath. It is followed by the sequel of Parable of the Talents. The reason these so captured me was the re-creation of society. I would love to re-read these sometime soon.

My other favorites have to be the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, even though the third book isn't out yet. Oryx and Crake entertwines with The Year of the Flood and portray a post genetic engineering, post environmental destruction, post sweeping plague nation. It isn't quite to the rebuilding stage, as the wacky cult of God's Gardener's predates the "flood" and tries to survive past it, but you definitely get a sense that the time might be past for humanity, even though some still survive. I love Atwood's humor, her criticism of society, and her unethical characters. It somehow translates to a believability that doesn't come across many other places.

I'm sure some people reading this are shocked I don't include some other titles on my list. I've read Alas, Babylon but you could argue that it is more of a pre-apocalypse book, they just know it is coming. Earth Abides didn't capture me as much as some of the others, but I like how it portrays the earth-as-champion, over the destructive temporary humanity. I read the first of the S. M. Stirling series, Dies the Fire, but it came across to me as the fantasy of every D&D player, to prove that there was always a reason to study medieval weaponry... I found it tiring. I wouldn't even include The Road on my list, just because I thought the sparseness left too much to be desired. I know most would disagree with me on that one.

There are still some left I haven't read and have been saving for a rainy day - A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I've heard has some humor in it, and the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man.