This is how we buy our books, buy our books, buy our books...

In which the writer rambles on at length about her method of selecting books for purchase, and invites similar ruminations from her gentle readers, should they be so inclined.

I used to just drop into bookstores whenever I had some money that I didn’t need for rent or food, and buy all the books I saw that looked interesting. But for the past five or six years now, my disabilities have prevented me from actually going out to stores and buying books in such a spontaneous fashion. Now I buy mostly online. Sometimes, in-store special coupons arrive, or our local independent science fiction bookstore is having a sale because they’re overstocked on used books, or whatever, and my partner goes and looks for books for me, but about 80 percent of my current bookbuying is done on line.

Because of this change in the manner of my bookbuying, there have slowly evolved some changes in the manner in which I select the books I buy. Because it’s not a spontaneous act anymore, I first started keeping a list of books I wanted to read, so I’d remember what I wanted when it came time to sit down and place a book order. The list started to grow, and I began to realise that this list could be more than a simple reminder of things I wanted to order. It could actually be a way of shaping my reading. I could go in search of books that catered to my interests rather than just reading books I’d heard about somewhere or books by my favourite authors.

Over time, then, I have assigned myself a number of “projects” with respect to reading – they’re not quite so closely held as to be goals, nor are they, precisely, guidelines, but they are things I want to take into account when I decide what books to buy in any given book order.

You see, I buy on a budget. Digression: I didn’t always do this. For a very large part of my life, I was poor (by choice, to some extent – I was very resistant about going into the corporate world where the money is) and bought books whenever I had extra money. Then I did find a corporate job I could cope with, and started having more disposable income as a result, and found myself buying a lot of books. Now not so poor, I slowly began to realise that if I continued spending all of my extra money on books, I would never have any money for other things I had also realised I wanted or needed. And then I went and bought this money-eating black hole known as a house. Hence, the budget, because otherwise, I could spend every cent I have to spare on books, which would seriously interfere with my ability to, say, pay for the new air conditioner or insulation in the basement or all the other things the house demands. End of digression.

So. I allow myself a certain amount of money to spend each month on books for my own reading pleasure. (Twice a year, I sort of get to cheat, because that’s when I buy birthday and Christmas presents for my partner, and our tastes are similar enough that at least half of the books I buy for him are also books I’d like to read. I am so evil. ) I allow myself some leeway to exceed my budget on special occasions – for instance, when a small press with a backlist full of books I want has a clearance sale, or something similar – because it’s always a good thing to have more books.

But for my regular monthly book shopping – which I do in one shot, usually, from my online bookseller of choice – here’s how I go about it. First. I look to see which of my several dozen “favourite writers ever” have something new out that month; that normally takes up about half of my monthly budget. Then I order one or two recently published books by authors new to me that have been highly recommended, or well-reviewed or otherwise generated enough of a buzz that I’ve heard about them and want to read them (recent Tiptree, Brandon or Lambda award winners, for example). Sometimes I’ll add a book or two that I’ve just run into somewhere that sounds interesting, often because it’s been mentioned on a blog I read or it’s a new release from one of the small presses that I often order from (and hence check up on their websites for new releases every once in a while) or pick a couple of books at random from my 34-page (in 9 point type with quarter-inch margins top and bottom) list of books I’d like to read some day.

With whatever money is left in my budget, I pick a couple of books based on the various projects I’ve adopted. These projects are:

* To read more books by writers from countries other than Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain
* To read more books by writers of colour
* To read more books by queer writers (that is to say, writers who are gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited, or who otherwise identify as a member of a gender or sexual minority)
* To collect and re-read many of my favourite books from the past that have wandered away from my libraries over the years
* To finally read all the books that people have been recommending to me over the years but somehow I never got around to, or could find a copy (it’s so much easier to find out-of-print books now that there are so many places to order from online)
* To fill in some notable gaps in my “special interest” collections, such as Arthurian and Arthurian-inspired literature, utopic and dystopic fiction, the complete works of certain adored authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin, and the like.

Following this method certainly insures that I have a wide variety of new books to read each month, something to suit almost every mood. Which is a good thing, because unlike many readers, I can't just suddenly decide to go buy a book if I look around and don't happen to see anything I want to just just now already on my shelves somewhere.

On first looking into C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner

I have no idea why it’s taken me this long to read C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner. It’s not as if I hadn’t read some of her other books, years ago. It’s not as if I didn’t know she was a total genius at writing alien cultures (the Faded Sun books are among my favourite sf books, period, and at least partly for that reason). It’s not as if I hadn’t read dozens of reviews of the book (and the series that follows it) and references to it over the years that would have been more than enough to pique my fancy. It’s not as if I had some bizarre idea that I wouldn’t like it.

It’s just that, somehow, I’d never actually gone into a store, picked up the book, bought it, brought it home and read it.

Well, that’s all changed.

As part of my current project to finally read all the books I knew I wanted to read but somehow never got around to actually doing it, I have now acquired and read Foriegner. It was everything I’d expected from a Cherryh book about the contact of cultures, the awareness of alienness, the politics of difference. It was brilliant, and of course I plan to acquire and all the other books in the series now (I figure one a month for the next year will bring me up to date).

What can one say about a masterpiece, especially when I suspect that almost everyone reading this has already read the book and agrees with my feeling of “well, damn, there she’s gone and blown me away again”?

For the few who don’t know the book, the set-up is this: a human colony ship, using kind of hyperjump technology, goes far off track and ends up in a part of the galaxy far from Earth, far from their original destination, with no idea where they are, no way to go back and limited resources to keep on going. They head for the closest star that appears likely to have a habitable planet, and find a world already inhabited by an intelligent species, the atevi who are well on their way to industrialisation but still a long way from spaceflight.

What to do now? They have the automated equipment on board to build a space station, so they do that, to provide themselves a base. The colonists, for the most part, decide that the only thing to do is go down to the planet (a one-way trip, as they will have to built a society capable of early space flight – either on their own, or with the planet’s inhabitants, before they can get off the planet again) and try to establish a small colony somewhere that won’t be too intrusive or have too much of an effect on the atevi. The crew decide to use what resources the have or can acquire from asteroids to keep on exploring in the general region.

Skip forward 200 years. Contact with the atevi has had its problems, and some degree of violence, but has now settled into an uneasy peace between the human colony, isolated on an island, atevi. The humans have formed a trade alliance with the most powerful of the atevi social and political units known as associations (Cherryh being the exceptional writer of alien cultures that she is, not only is their cultural and political diversity among the atevi, but their high-level social organising structure is not what we think of as a nation), and they as slowly and very carefully exchanging scientific knowledge for survival, hoping to bring the atevi to a point where it will be possible for them to regain spaceflight using the atevi’s industrial capacity while trying to behave ethically and steering the atevi away from the negative consequences of an unchecked industrialisation such as Earth experienced.

Of course, there is also the problem of communicating scientific worldviews across species and cultural borders – Cherryh raises the interesting question of whether science is indeed a universal language, as many have argued, or whether the physiological nature of the organs of thought and perception in different species, the different psychological structures that will develop in beings with different biologies and hence different mating, reproductive, parenting and other behaviours, and the different cultures that can evolve among aliens, with alien brains and minds, living in alien environments, means that certain elements of scientific knowledge will be seen and used differently.

The novel focuses on the experiences of Bren Cameron, the latest in a series of paid-hi, humans who serve as translator-diplomat-advisors to the ruler of the powerful western association, which is one of the key political units among the atevi. It is his job to try to interpret, not just language, but culture and science, between the two very different species, one of which is native to the planet and numerous, the other of which is an isolated colony of interlopers with superior scientific knowledge, in such a manner as to avoid war and ecological or economic disaster.

And of course, the biggest dangers in what he’s trying to do aren’t so much what he doesn’t know about the atevi, but what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know, and what he thinks he knows, but doesn’t.

(no subject)

Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison

What a wonderful find.

Mitchison’s part-fantastical, part-historical tale of a young girl named Halla, cast out by a wicked step-mother, mothered by bears, raised by dragons, taught to “travel light” by the Wanderer (he of the one eye and the two ravens), is a delightfully subversive story. Once she accepts that she cannot be a dragon, Halla encounters many people who have clear ideas of what she should be and what she should do, from the nasty hero who kills her guardian dragon Uggi and threatens to teach her “the way of women” (she escapes with the help of another of the dragons) to the priests and nobles of Micklegard (Constantinople) who want to use her gift for talking to animals to win money on the horse races, and later decide she belongs in a nunnery (she escapes with the help of a friendly Valkyrie), to the young man who decides that he wants to marry her.

But Halla has her own path to follow, and her own place in the world to find, and as long as she chooses to travel light – unencumbered by baggage of the physical kind, but also of the kind of expectations and assumptions and preconceptions that limit the ways one can learn and grow and adapt to change – she remains free to become herself.

The style is very plain and straightforward, the characters distinctly drawn and memorable, the message invaluable but never preached about.

I particularly enjoyed the bits about growing up with the dragons and coming to understand just how annoying and destructive those pesky heroes can be. Here's the dragonish take on the whole dragon-hunting fetish of so many heroes:

Kings and champions and heroes, unfairly armed with flame-resisting armour and unpleasant lances, were encouraged by certain underground elements and against the wishes and interests of the bulk of the population, to interfere between princess and dragon. Occasionally this resulted in tragedies, as in the case of the good dragon who was killed by the man George, or of the dragon so cruelly done to death by Perseus when about to make the acquaintance of Andromeda. It could be verified that no princess was ever asked whether she wanted to be rescued and carried off by a dragon-slayer to a fate (no doubt) worse than death.

I wish I’d known about this book when I was young.

Travel Light should be at least as well-known as a classic children’s novel as The Hobbit, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or A Wrinkle in Time. Please, if you have kids –especially girls, but boys too – in your life, give them this book.

Stalking P. C. Hodgell

P. C. Hodgell's Kencyrath books:
God Stalk
The Dark of the Moon
Seeker's Mask
To Ride a Rathorn
Blood and Ivory: A Tapestry


A long time ago, people started recommending P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk to me as a complex, well-written and highly original fantasy novel that they were sure I'd like. The problem was, I could never find it in the stores.

Then I heard that there was a sequel, The Dark of the Moon, and that it was just as good, and that I really should read them both. But I could never find either of them. and over time, I sort of forgot, except when someone would mention one or the other of the Kencyrath books and I'd say "I've heard that they're really good" and the other person would say "You mean you haven't read them? You'd love them!" and I'd look again for a while, and then forget again.

Then a couple of years ago, I was hunting down a rumour that Diane Duane was writing a fourth novel in the Five Kingdoms series and that it would be released by Meisha Merlin Publishing - and on that website, I discovered that P.C. Hodgell had written two more books in the series - Seeker's Mask and To Ride a Rathorn - and that Meisha Merlin had published them, and an omnibus edition of the first two books in the series. At that time, the first three had been released as paperbacks but were not currently in stock, and the fourth book was still available only in hardcover. Happy that the books were finally all available, I decided to wait for a paperback release of the fourth novel and a new printing of the first three novels and then buy everything at once. I'd check in every once in a while, patiently waiting.

Next thing I heard, Meisha Merlin was going out of business. I ordered the hardcover of To Ride a Rathorn and the trade paperback collection of short stories, Blood and Ivory: A Tapestry, and now fully committed to reading the series, I set about acquiring the three earlier books. But of course, that meant buying used copies, and that meant that once I'd found copies at a reasonable price, I'd have to bake them for a long time to drive out the remains of perfume, airspray, hand lotion and other personal care products that would have permeated the pages during their previous use.

But just last week, when examining the stacks of used books that are currently being detoxed (something I do every maybe three or four times a year), I discovered that all three of the earlier books were now safe enough to read (with some precautions, of course), and so I have been lost ever since in the highly original and deeply satisfying world of Rathillien, the last in a long line of worlds where the Three Peoples of the Kencyrath have been forced to retreat to in their millenia-long, but failing, battle against the evil force of Perimal Darkling, which seeks to overrun the universes.

And all I can say is, everyone was right.

These are some of the most amazing fantasy novels I've ever read. Complex, original, fully realised with a backstory to rival Tolkien's (and he started at the moment of creation, which is a pretty serious backstory), this is the story of Jamethiel, Highborn of the House of Knorth. her twin brother Torison and their cousin Kindrie - who may or may not be the prophesied Tyr-Ridan, the three who will take on the aspects of the three gods of the Kencyrath and lead the final battle against Perimal Darkling.

It's also a story about a young woman trying to discover her true self as she slowly uncovers the story of her past and her family's past, a story of madness and deceit, betrayal and murder, dark secrets, forgotten bonds and ancient feuds.

It's an exploration of the ways that the unconscious, the subconscious, the landscape of the mind, the territory of belief, the consensus of perception, the power of emotions (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) and the language of dreams interact.

It is a presentation of an extraordinarily fluid world where shapes, bodies, times and places shift and change and mingle and overlap just as easily as emotions, thoughts, wills and nightmares, and all that there really is to stand on is one's honour and one's personal truth.

It's an epic of high fantasy and a personal, psychological family drama.

It's more things than I can list, and it's absolutely riveting.

And the latest news is that P.C. Hodgell's novels have found a new home with Baen Books, which has made the first four novels of the series available as e-books, has announced plans to republish them in paper format and has bought the fifth novel in the series, to be published next year. I hope that these extraordinary books, now all housed together with one publisher, will at last find the audience they deserve.