My life in books

Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation may be labeled as young adult fiction, but this is no light and easy read. IT’s just after the Civil War in America, and the dead have begun to rise. The shamblers are variously blamed on Emancipation, the wrath of God, or a strange new infectious agent. In America, black and indigenous people have been designated as shock troops, and from the age of 12, young girls and boys of colour are taught how to fight zombies and keep the white folks of America safe.

Dread Nation is the story of one such girl, mixed race Jane McKeene, daughter of a white southern woman of means to an unspecified black man, certainly not her absent husband. She’s being taught to be an Attendant - a lady’s bodyguard - at one of the best schools for Negro girls, but Jane is not exactly a devoted scholar or dutiful pupil, though she does excel at marksmanship and hand to hand combat.

In the course of her somewhat unapproved extracurricular activities, Jane, her ‘bad boy’ friend Jackson, and her fellow student, Katherine, a black girl light enough to easily pass, discover some nefarious plots, of course, and are sent off to languish in the coils of one of them - Summerland, a western colony patrolled day and night by black and indigenous folk kidnapped into service to keep the community safe for white settlers.

But even Summerland hides dangers and secrets still unknown to Jane and Katherine. As the situation grows ever worse Jane needs al her intelligence, ingenuity, and battle skills to survive.

First in a series.

Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.

For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.

I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.

It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.

Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.

The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:

“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”

Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:

“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.

Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:

“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”

Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.

And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.

Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”

Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.

I decided to continue with my self-education project on the AIDS epidemic by reading The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin. Pepin is an expert in the study and treatment of infectious diseases. Early in his career, he spent four years working as a medical officer in Zaire, and later, conducted research on HIV in The Gambia and other nations in central and west Africa. He is now a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, where he is also Director of the Center for International Health.

Pepin begins by offering the readers a brief summary of his explorations of the origins of HIV, noting areas where his narrative is based on solid evidence and others, where scientific evidence is unavailable and he has made use of the most reasonable hypotheses to fill in the lacunae in the scientific record.

"This book will summarise and assemble various pieces of the puzzle that have gradually been delineated over the last decade by a small group of investigators, to which I have added historical research of my own. Some elements are irrefutable, such as the notion that the Pan troglodytes troglodytes chimpanzee is the source of HIV-1. Other elements are less clear, for example the exact moment of the cross-species transmission (sometime in the first three decades of the twentieth century). My own contribution focused around the idea that medical interventions requiring the massive use of reusable syringes and needles jumpstarted the epidemic by rapidly expanding the number of infected individuals from a handful to a few hundred or a few thousand. This set the stage for the sexual transmission of the virus, starting in core groups of sex workers and their male clients and later spreading to the rest of the adult population. Some parts of the story rely on circumstantial evidence, such as the links between the Congo and Haiti and the potential contribution of the blood trade in triggering the epidemic in Port-au-Prince, from where it moved into the US."

In his Introduction, Pepin acknowledges that, as a medical doctor, working in Zaire during the early 1980s, with limited resources, he probably engaged in procedures that, while considered best practices at the time and under those circumstances, contributed to the spread of HIV infection. He treated many patients for tuberculosis with a protocol that involved multiple injections of streptomycin, and many more for sleeping sickness with injections of a drug called melarsoprol; glass syringes were reused and sterilisation with an autoclave was not always possible - indeed, many of the medical outposts he worked in had no autoclave. Given the time period and the conditions of his work, it is almost certain that at least some patients were infected under his care. It was in part his realisation of this, which grew from later research into the links between treatment for sleeping sickness and HIV-2 infections in what had once been Portuguese Guinea, that led to his decision to research the origins of AIDS. He adds:

"Some may say that understanding the past is irrelevant, what really matters is the future. I disagree. There are at least two good reasons for attempting to elucidate the factors behind the emergence of the HIV pandemic. First, we have a moral obligation to the millions of human beings who have died, or will die, from this infection. Second, this tragedy was facilitated (or even caused) by human interventions: colonisation, urbanisation and probably well-intentioned public health campaigns. Hopefully, we can gain collective wisdom and humility that might help avoid provoking another such disaster in the coming decades."

As this suggests, in his narrative, Pepin looks not only at the scientific story of the transformation of the simian infection agent SIV to the human agent HIV, but also at the historical conditions that enabled the disease - which many scientists believe may have crossed the species barrier on multiple occasions during the history of human-ape interactions in Africa - to reach epidemic proportions on this occasion. In doing so, he takes aim squarely at the social choices that made these conditions possible - from the catastrophic effects of European colonialism on African societies, to the devastating role that the profit motive played in the spread of the virus through collection and distribution of blood and blood products.

Pepin's narrative is detailed and strongly argued; he provides a great deal of technical information, but not so much that the informed layman cannot follow the argument and see how its conclusions have been reached. Beginning with basic epidemiological information - the distribution and prevalence of the many types and sub-types of the virus found in Africa, and what this implies to the scientist searching for the origins of the disease - Pepin follows each link in the chain of evidence like a forensic puzzle.

I found it fascinating reading, and was impressed by the breadth and depth of Pepin’s research into every aspect of the scientific and sociological elements that led to the breakout, at this place and time, of a disease that had started to develop, then sputtered out on a number of earlier occasions. From the gender ratios of the residents of Brazzaville in the 1930s to post-colonial Zaireian policies on regulating prostitution to the history of large-scale public health programs involving injection treatments for disease such as sleeping sickness, trypanosomiasis, yaws and syphilis in the different colonies of French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, the degree of detailed documentation of the conditions that led to the HIV epidemic is exhaustive.

Pepin’s style is an interesting blend of the dry academic, and the wry wit. His occasional asides, which often point out issues of colonialism and racism, are personal and in a way, endearing. Case in point: when discussing the work of Louise Pearce, an early medical researcher, he begins “Louise Pearce, a visiting American scientist (always referred to as Miss Pearce rather than Dr Pearce, her unmarried status apparently being more important than her degrees!)...” I came to look forward to these trenchant observations as moments of connection to the author amidst the sometimes daunting mass of data.

Overall, an excellent epidemiological study that should answer all but the most technical questions anyone might have about the origins of the AIDS epidemic.

Craig ​Timberg's Tinderbox: ​How ​the ​West ​Sparked ​the ​AIDS ​Epidemic was, as far as I can tell from reading a few reviews, somewhat controversial when it was first published. Certainly there's a lot in this book, which looks primarily at how the AIDS epidemic started, and the conditions that both encouraged and hindered its spread in Africa, that makes one stop and think.

Timberg begins with an anti-colonialist narrative of how AIDS finally, after centuries of being confined to the simian population of Central Africa with no significant or recorded crossing of species lines, erupted into the human population. He identifies Western engagement in Africa as the catalyst, from the vast social disruptions caused by European projects intended to steal the resource wealth of the continent by forcing its people to do the work of harvesting and transporting, to the effects of both Christianisation and forced separation of families on traditional patterns of marriage, initiation rituals and sexual activity.

In particular, he points to a history of circumcision as an initiation ritual, and the tendency to have polyamorous but closed circles of sexual relationships as two traditions that might have limited the spread of AIDS throughout Africa had they not been lost in the decades of colonialist exploitation and ' modernisation.'

Timberg presents considerable evidence that the greater resistance of circumcised men to HIV infection was noted on many occasions during early research into risk factors, but never considered as a potential part of prevention education and programming.

He also notes that in those instances where African nations focused on trying to change sexual behaviour, stressing the idea of faithfulness within relationships and partner reduction in general (such as the 'zero grazing' program in Uganda) rates of infection fell significantly.

The narrative he constructs around attempt to slow the rate of infections across Africa contrasts the mostly African-based programs focused on changing sexual behaviour with programs imposed from outside along with Western aid money, which stressed condom use. He also contrasts attempts to introduce multi-faceted prevention programs, such as ABC (abstinence, be faithful, condoms), with programs focusing only on using condoms. Summarising the findings of one epidemiologist who examined the effectiveness of condom-centred prevention programs, Timberg says:

"Hearst found that condoms rarely failed when used properly by individuals, but he couldn’t find any examples of condom promotion campaigns slowing HIV’s spread in African societies with widespread epidemics. He acknowledged their role in reducing infection in epidemics such as Thailand’s, where transmission was concentrated within the sex industry. But while African men often used condoms in casual hookups or with prostitutes, few did so with their wives or girlfriends, despite years of public health campaigns encouraging the practice. He also raised the unsettling possibility, stimulated by some disturbing findings his research team had made in Uganda, that aggressive condom promotion campaigns, often featuring racy images and double entendres, may make casual sex seem more acceptable, potentially helping to spread HIV."

Condoms seemed not the be the answer for Africa, a possibility that few Westerners were willing to accept. Instead, Timberg suggests that the program ultimately championed by his collaborator in this book, David Halperin, focused on circumcision, partner reduction and changes in sexual behaviour, would be more effective in African nations: "What existed in Africa’s AIDS Belt, and in only a couple of other places on earth, was a “lethal cocktail” of extensive heterosexual networks and low circumcision rates. Changing either factor, on a broad enough level, could cause the pace of new infections to slow dramatically."

While Timberg deplores the imposition of Western ideas of how to fight the spread of the disease on African cultures, he does not ignore the mistakes made by African governments - often prompted by a desire to refute Western perceptions of Africans as promiscuous, primitive, and sexually over-active, or by resistance to conditions attached to money intended to help prevent the rising number if new infections and treat those already infected.

It is an interesting book, and one that tries to look at the ways in which Western imperialism and ignorance have affected the path of the disease in Africa. I find myself wishing, though, for a book that covers similar ground written by an African.

Although Winona LaDuke's novel, Last Standing Woman is written as fiction, the author states in a note that "the circumstances, history, and traditional stories, as well as some of the characters, are true, retold to the best of my ability." Indeed, Last Standing Woman tells with a sometimes searing truthfulness the history of the White Earth Anishinaabe people from the 1860s to the present, through seven generations, including three women named Ishkwegaabawiikwe, or Last Standing Woman.

The story of the White Earth people's resistance to racism, oppression and attempts at assimilation is told in an episodic fashion, tracing first the loss of identity and then the struggle to reclaim it despite such obstacles as land swindling, missionaries and their boarding schools, government housing projects, and alcoholism and sexual abuse.

As if to demonstrate the survival of her people, LaDuke writes the final chapter of the book - which deals with the vision of the newest woman to be named Ishkwegaabawiikwe - in Anishinaabe, declaring to the world that despite all the years of struggle, her people's language and culture survive in the young and will survive into the future.






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Junot Diaz's remarkable novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is one of those books that leaves me not at all certain of how to talk about it. I could talk about the characters, who are memorable and vibrant and clearly drawn, even those that would be caricatures in a lesser work. I could talk about the language, which is a mix of English, Spanish, and the evolving form of speech known as Spanglish (Wikipedia informs me that it is neither pidgin nor creole, but is more than just code-switching or jumbling phrases from both parent languages), which is engaging and creative and wholly apt. I could rave about the wide range of multi-cultural references from genre novels to literary classics, and how they mirror the same kind of rich amalgam between cultures that the use of Spanglish does. This is in many ways a novel of the post-colonial world in that it is a mosaic of multiple influences.

I could talk about the novel as an indictment of what Junot (in an interview in The Boston Review) calls:

The rape culture of the European colonization of the New World—which becomes the rape culture of the Trujillato (Trujillo just took that very old record and remixed it)—is the rape culture that stops the family from achieving decolonial intimacy, from achieving decolonial love. (http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/paula-ml-moya-decolonial-love-interview-junot-d%C3%ADaz)

I could try to convey the plot - or plots - of this complex novel. There's the life of the young American-Dominican man who is steeped in popular culture and longs to be a writer, told by another young American-Dominican man who longs to be a writer, and the curse on his family and how that has shown itself though three generations, and then there is the story of life (and death) in the Dominican Republic under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, and all of this is tied together in a narrative that doesn't let you go even after you've finished reading.

Or I could just direct you to some more coherent reviews that will tell you that this is a great novel and one that deserves to be read, like these two:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html
http://www.thenewcanon.com/wondrous_life.html

Keri Hulme's novel about damage and redemption, The Bone People, is at once the story of three broken people who must be stripped down to the bone before they can begin to heal, and also a vision of the need for a cultural renewal for New Zealand's peoples that brings white and Maori together.

Set in rural New Zealand, the novel centres on the relationships between three people. Kerewin, mostly white with some Maori heritage, is an artist who has lost her ability to create; she has broken all ties with her family and lives by the sea in a tower (a Rapunzel who ultimately must cut her hair and tear down the tower she has built of her own volition, for the princes who come are too much in need of freeing themselves to free her as well). Joe, mostly Maori with some white heritage, has been damaged by childhood traumas, by the loss of dreams, and by the death of his wife and biological son; gentle when sober, jovial when drunk, with a core of violence that is unleashed by frustration and his sense of failure. His adopted son, called Simon Peter (a fragile rock to build anything on) is the only known survivor from the foundering of a small vessel off the coast, near the small town where Joe lives and where Kerewin has built her tower; a precocious white child of perhaps seven or eight, he is unable to speak (though not for any medical reason), and difficult to deal with, as he often skips school, roams the country side, steals, has seemingly irrational fears that send him into hysteria, and reacts to the frustrations of being misunderstood and unable to communicate with outbursts of violence.

When Simon breaks into Kerewin's tower, and Joe must come to retrieve him, a bond is formed among the three of them, and their interrelationships will ultimately result in stripping all three down to the bone and forcing them on journeys both physical and spiritual through which they may find the paths to healing, redemption and renewal.

Hulme does not hold back when dealing with the ambivalent nature of relationships - however loving - between people struggling with isolation, fear, frustration and loss. Both Kerewin and Joe abuse alcohol, a coping mechanism that Simon attempts when possible. All three resort to violence - in both word (or sound, in Simon's case) and deed - when pushed too far. And yet, with a wisdom that today's more simplistic models of behaviour have forgotten, she knows that when people are badly broken, violence and pain can co-exist with love, that when people are not whole there will be much that is bitter in the midst of sweetness.

What can redeem such relationships is finding the way to heal and be whole, and Hulme gives us some ideas about how that can happen, for individuals and for a people - through finding one's roots, one's centre and one's self, through spiritual renewal and reinvigorating old traditions in newer and more inclusive ways, through ending isolation and embracing family and community.

As someone from a white settler culture living in a country where, like New Zealand, the aboriginal people have been marginalised and in many cases divided from their roots and traditions, the portrayal of the Maori peoples and their relationship to the white settler culture in this novel was of particular interest to me. Hulme, who is herself biracial and identifies with her Maori heritage while also embracing her European background, seems to me to be making a bold proposal for healing and community in settler nations - instead of assimilating aboriginal peoples into the primarily European culture of the settlers, assimilate the settlers into a vibrant and growing aboriginal culture that can incorporate both settlers and aboriginal peoples into one whole and healed community.

(For more thoughts on The Bone People, may I suggest checking out Jo Walton's review at Tor.com? http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/03/maori-fantasy-keri-hulmes-the-bone-people)

Some interesting anthologies and collections of short stories came my way last year. The anthologies included two nicely edited theme anthologies by John Joseph Adams (dystopias and homages to Barsoom), a vamipre themed antholgy edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, a survey of urban fantasy edited by Peter Beagle and a dragon-themed anthology edited by Jack Dann.

Of particular interest were two volumes edited or co-edited by Connie Wilkins: the second volume in a new annual series of anthologies featuring short stories with lesbian protagonists; and an uneven but engaging selection of alternate history short stories with a focus on queer protagonists as nexi of change.

I was also delighted to be able to obtain a copy of an anthology edited by Nisi Shawl of short stories written by authors of colour who attended Clarion as Octavia E. Butler Scholars. The anthology was offered by the Carl Brandon Society for a limited time as a fund-raising project and is no longer available.

Peter Beagle (ed.), The Urban Fantasy Anthology
John Joseph Adams (ed.), Under the Moons of Mars
John Joseph Adams (ed.), Brave New Worlds
Nancy Kilpatrick (ed.), Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead
Jack Dann (ed.), The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Nisi Shawl (ed.), Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars
Connie Wilkins & Steve Berman (eds.), Heiresses of Russ 2012
Connie Wilkins (ed.), Time Well-Bent: Queer Alternative Histories


I also read several collections this year, including two more volunes from PM Press's Outspoken Authors series, featuring work by and interviews with Nalo Hopkinson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Other collections of works by SFF writers included: a set of novellas from Mercedes Lackey featuring two familiar characters, Jennifer Talldeer and Diana Tregarde, and a new heroine, techno-shaman Ellen McBride; a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Bear featuring forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett; short stories by Maureen McHugh; and forays ibto the fantasy realm of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander.

In honour of Alice Munro, this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, I read a collection of her more recent short stories (and plan on reading several more in the coming months - I've always loved her work and am delighted that she has been so deservedly recognised). Also worthy of note was Drew Hayden Taylor's collection of stories set among the residents of the fictional Otter Lake First Nations reserve, and Margaret Laurence's short stories set in Ghana. In the realm of historical fiction, There were stories by Margaret Frazer featuring medieval nun and master sleuth Dame Frevisse; I discovered and devoured Frazer's novels last year, and will speak of them in a later post.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike 
Nalo Hopkinson, Report from Planet Midnight
Mercedes Lackey, Trio of Sorcery
Elizabeth Bear, Garrett Investigates
Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse
Lloyd Alexander, The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain

Margaret Laurence, The Tomorrow-Tamer
Margaret Frazer, Sins of the Blood
Drew Hayden Taylor, Fearless Warriors
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

All in all, I found a wide range of short fiction to enjoy this year.

As Constant Reader has probably noticed, I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction, but I do read some. The remaining books in this category to be recorded in my reads for 2009 are:



Tracks, Louise Erdrich - I enjoyed this thoroughly. Erdrich tells a most engaging story and writes compellingly of the circumstances of First Nations people forced to live under the oversight of white settler law and authorities.


Feminist Fables, Suniti Namjoshi - A collection of short - often very short - narrative pieces that are a combination of keen observation informed by feminist vision, and adry and delightful sense of humour.


Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence - another collection of shorter, linked narratives, set in the fictional town of Manwaka which serves as the nexus from many of the characters in Laurence's fiction.


One Good Story, That One, Thomas King - collection of short stories that explore the relationships between First Nations and settler peoples and their perceptions of each other, told with King's trademark piercing humour and truth.

Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Gauri Viswanathan

This is a fascinating collection of 19 interviews with Edward W Said, conducted between 1976 and 2000 and published in a variety of scholarly and other venues. Through these interviews, it is possible to follow the development of Said’s scholarship and his political activism, as they illuminate the range, penetration and passions in Said’s intellectual and public life.

Editor Gavri Viswanathan puts it best in her introduction:

The interviews Said gave over the past three decades boldly announce that neither his own books and essays nor those written about him have the last word. The first thing to note is not only th number of interviews Said has given, both to print and broadcast media, but also the number of locations in which they took place, spanning Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. They confirm his presence on the world stage as one of the most forceful public intellectuals of our time, a man who evokes interest in the general public for his passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination... Together, [these interviews] reveal a ceaselessly roving mind returning to earlier ideas in his books and novels and engaging with them anew. One measure of the fluidity and range of Said’s thought is his ability to revisit arguments made in his books and essays, not merely to defend and elaborate on them but, more important, both to mark their limits and probe their extended possibilities, especially in contexts other than those which first gave rise to them.

Said’s topics range from discourses on the development of his own work, particularly on Orientalism and post-colonial theory, to ruminations on his childhood and how it affects his sense of self in the world, to his political activism and evolving relationship with the PLO, to reflections on other authors and areas from Austen, Conrad, Naipaul and Rushdie to Derrida and Foucault.

There’s a wealth of thought in these interviews, well worth savouring.