The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 23: Alisa Alering

 

 

At Least We Still Have Books
by Alisa Alering

 

It's been a bad year for a lot of things, but a good year for reading. I traveled a lot less in 2020 and some of that recovered time has been devoted to reading. And perhaps more intentional reading because, instead of choosing something that could be enjoyed in small snatches or reasonably expected to keep my attention on a transatlantic flight, I had a longer horizon to make more strategic choices. Plus a desire to distract myself from feelings of stagnation and treading water.

This started with a plan to read more middle grade (roughly ages 9-13) novels, with half a notion that this serve as background research for writing one myself one day. Going in, I thought I would be all about the fun, whimsical, adventurous ones, but it turns out I prefer serious stories where somebody dies. Go figure.

Unlike YA, MG books are--on average--less likely to absorb adult readers. But that doesn't hold true categorically. These four are pretty great books, no matter what your age:

—All the Greys on Greene Street, by Laura Tucker - A stolen painting, a catatonically depressed mom,  a guerilla artist, and a day running wild in nature that restores a friendship 

—The Line Tender, by Kate Allen - A dead mom, quarry swimming, and a detailed shark autopsy

—Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, by Carlos Hernandez - This one's more on the zany side but inventive, refreshing, and absolutely one of a kind: Raw chickens, multiple universes, sick baby brothers, and lot of delicious Cuban food. 

—The Parker Inheritance, Varian Johnson - Hidden treasure, clues from a dead grandma, new friends, and a history of the Jim Crow South

Sometime late last year, my partner suggested we start reading poetry to each other.  We dipped our toes in with Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy from Bloodaxe Books in the UK. We started reading front to back --like you do--until we realized that all of the fun, hopeful, positive poems are in the first third, all the poems about love, marriage, and family are in the middle, and all the ones about cancer, exile, genocide, death, and the bomb are in the last third. So when we finished that starter volume and moved on to Being Alive, we now select each day's poems using a page number randomizer. We don't know what mood we’ll encounter on any given evening, but we no longer have to dread the final third.

Two poems that for me have made the whole experience worthwhile:

"Dawn Revisited," by Rita Dove
"There Was No Difference," by Pablo Neruda.

In August, we also finally embarked on a plan to watch more movies. For people who watch a lot of movies, maybe this doesn't seem very hard. But in my household, we don't spend a lot of time in front of the TV screen anyhow, and those few hours are filled with tried-and-true favorites. My partner and I are both chronically indecisive, and it always turned out that the genre-busting, dystopian Weird Western set in an isolated Brazilian village that the Guardian calls a 'hallucinatory trauma' (Bacurau) that looked so intriguing on Monday afternoon no longer seemed like such a great choice when it was Saturday night and we were tired and just ready to settle into a warm bath. On top of that, I always worried about my responsibilities if I choose a film and it turns out to be a real stinker. So we settled on picking picking a list of 6 movies at a time in advance and working our way through that list, one per week. Narrowing the options makes it harder to give up and just watch Derry Girls again. We've only watched 14 films so far, but my favorite was:

 

Atlantics - This recent Cannes-prize winner from Senegalese director Mati Diop is a romance and a ghost story and social commentary and feminism all rolled into one. Some young construction workers who haven't been paid in months emigrate by sea. Their boat is lost and their ghosts return to possess their girlfriends, who demand the money of their employer. That sounds straightforward, but the film is elegant, affecting, and dreamy--and just a little bit creepy.

Other notable books of 2020:

Leave the World Behind,  by Rumaan Alam - I heard Alam on NPR and was really sold on the premise of a white family from NYC vacationing in a rural AirBnB when a late-night knock on the door brings an older black couple who say it’s their house and they need to stay because sudden blackout has swept the city. But it's much more about the (vague, unspecified) apocalypse than it is about race and society. Reminded me most of Station Eleven. It was a very unsettling read.

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - I couldn't wait to read this one, and it didn't disappoint. I spent the ages 12-14 gulping down Victoria Holt and other gothic romances as fast as I could turn the pages. I was so excited by the prospect of indulging in the same tropes but with a new world twist. It goes a little more outright fantasy that the genre usually does, but all is forgiven. Plus, there are paper-freaking-dolls for the main character, and a playlist that I've really enjoyed.

The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nahesi Coates - I confess, I had a few doubts about this one when I started. I figured that since Coates is such a brilliant essayist, critic, memoirist, and commentator, he couldn't possibly be an equally gifted novelist. How wrong I was. I guess the world is sometimes unfair like that and heaps a whole bunch of different talents on one person. But I'm not going to complain, because that abundance resulted in such a good story. The fantastical element of 'conduction' is a unique one and perfectly suited to its context. The exploration of the complicated feelings of Hiram for his white and free brother

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado - The house at the center of this book is in my town (Bloomington, IN) and I can't help trying to figure out which house it is. There are little clues scattered throughout the text: drunken students wandering the golf course, the proximity of a forest, and the position of the driveway, etc. Providing these details are all accurate, I've got it narrowed down to one or two possibilities. House detecting aside, this is a unique, absorbing, inventive memoir, and you should probably read it.

Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo - I always try to read the Booker Prize shortlist (I don't always succeed, but I try). It often turns me on to fantastic books and authors, like Anna Burns' 2018 winner Milkman and Sally Rooney's Normal People. Following the lives of 12 women, I loved how their stories looped in and out of each other across generations and jobs and neighborhoods. And the final 'story', and the way it ties it all together was just fantastic. 

Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik - I tried reading this a few years ago and couldn't get into it. I'm a big fan of the Temeraire series, and I LOVED Uprooted, but I just couldn't get into this one the first time I tried. All the slog of Miriam's life in the village in the first chapters didn't appeal. But late last year, Nancy Werlin made a strong case for it and so I put the audiobook on hold at my library and persevered. I'm so glad I did. It's a really complex story that weaves together multiple tropes from fairy tales and folklore and rewrites them all.

And when I can’t sleep, and I want something to read that will soothe and not give me nightmares or remind me of the hand basket we are all living in, I turn to the Ruth Galloway mystery series by Elly Griffiths, about a forensic archaeologist living in a lonely cottage at the edge of Norfolk fens. They are just adventurous enough to keep my interest but cozy enough to reassure. I find them eminently soothing. Maybe you will too.

Finally, a shout out to my local Monroe County Public Library, which has kept me safely supplied with more than enough to read and listen to throughout this pandemic year by having very generous ebook arrangements and even upping the digital borrowing limits when taking out physical books became impossible. I haven't set foot in the library itself since March, but I don't forget that there's where all my glorious convenient free reading is coming  from. 

Alisa Alering is a writer, editor, and coach. Her most recent story "The Time I Found A Phone Booth Where I Could Talk To My (Dead) Dad," appears in the Autumn 2020 issue of Fireside Quarterly. Other fictions can be found in Mythic Delirium, Clockwork Phoenix 4, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and creativity workshops at the Highlights Foundation and Wiscon (well, when there *is* a Wiscon😞 ). She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013).  Her story "Madeleine Usher Usher" appeared in Aqueduct's Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries across the Known Multiverse. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2018, part 19: Alisa Alering

Surprised by Happiness
by Alisa Alering


I’m writing this post almost entirely so I can tell as many people as possible about a book I read this year that took me completely by surprise and turned out to be my favorite.

It is Happiness, by the Scottish-Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna. Like many writers and others who spend their days hunched over a keyboard, I have problems with my back. As therapy, I carry a heavy kettlebell up and down the floor of an empty warehouse, hoping to coax my muscles into equilibrium. Because the insides of empty warehouses aren’t spectacularly scenic, I listen to podcasts while I do this, particularly the Guardian Books podcast*. Which is how I found out about Happiness — a book I had never heard of by an author equally unknown to me.

Forna was a guest on the May 1 episode, where she talked about writing the reverse of the ‘Western guy goes to third-world country and observes it from his POV” novel. Then she read an early passage, in which (one of) the main characters(s), a psychiatrist from Sierra Leone who specializes in PTSD affecting civilians in war zones, arrives in London and goes out to dinner in a restaurant alone. Not really an action-packed scene. But when she stopped, my instant reaction was: “I’d read more of that.” This was a point-of-view I wanted to stay with, wanted to know more of what it saw.

So what’s it about? Urban foxes and migrants. Trauma and grief. Compassion and loneliness and unlikely friendships. Cities at night and in the early morning. The plot is driven by a few fairly transparent MacGuffins, which I was more than willing to forgive. Plot isn’t what this book is about, and yet it remained page-turning and consistently interesting. With all my experience of the hundreds (thousands?) of books I’ve read (and the few I’ve written) I couldn’t predict what was coming next, or where it was heading—but I wanted to find out.

In other reading, on a whim this year I decided to read all of the books on the Booker Longlist, whether or not I’m excited about them individually. A sort of arbitrary goal to help shift me from entrenched habits and broaden my horizons. I started with the book I was most intrigued by, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (in which I learned that the plural of ‘octopus’ is not ‘octopi’ but ‘octopodes') and have since made my way through:

• Belinda Bauers - Snap (glad to see a crime novel on the list, sorry it was this one)

• Rachel Kushner - The Mars Room 

• Michael Ondaatje – Warlight (what you’d expect from Ondaatje, a solid story packed with nostalgia)

• Richard Powers - The Overstory 

I just finished Sally Rooney’s highly-praised Normal People, which I wasn’t expecting to like but am really enjoying. All the talk of how ‘millennial’ it was put me off. But it’s not millennial. It’s human and real and funny and awful, and so well observed.


Next up: Sophie Mackintosh’s (so far) extremely odd The Water Cure.

Honorable mention to Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, which is my audiobook guilty pleasure. I thought I was so over all things Holmes with all of the recent adaptations and wouldn’t be able to face another for ten years at least, but these are so well-done, so well-narrated, so bright and lively and just plain fun, that I look forward to the housework and the exercise that comes with audiobook time.
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*This podcast has turned me on to so many excellent books to add to my to-read list: Maria Dahvana Headley’s modern Beowulf retelling, The Mere Wife, Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, and of course, Kate Atkinson’s Transcription.

 Alisa Alering was born in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania where she ran around barefoot and talked to the trees. Her short fiction has appeared in Mythic Delirium, Time Travel Tales, Clockwork Phoenix 4, Flash Fiction Online, and other places. She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013).  Her "The Night Farmers’ Museum" was chosen by judge Robert Coover as runner-up for the 2014 Italo Calvino Prize. Her story "Madeleine Usher Usher" appeared in Aqueduct's Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries across the Known Multiverse. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Listening, and Viewing in 2016, pt. 4: Alisa Alering

Pleasures 2016
by Alisa Alering

Novels

The best book I read this year is Evicted, by Matthew Desmond. I’ve seen it on a lot of year-end “Best Of” book lists, and I’m not surprised. It’s a well-researched, well-documented, yet extremely readable examination of renters, landlords, race, and social policy in Milwaukee. If that sounds dry, don’t believe it for a minute. It is just a fantastic book; Desmond tells the personal stories of landlords and tenants, both black and white, and shows a system that is fundamentally broken and causes far more harm than might initially appear. The only downside to reading this book is realizing how far we are from any practical solution.

A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar - I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, but Samatar being GoH at Wiscon this year gave me the shove I needed. Beautiful writing, beautiful immersive world. Rich with the possibilities of story and that element of elusiveness, of the magic being somehow just one step out of reach, just one breath beyond the candlelight, that makes it all the more compelling. Glad I finally got there.

The Chimes, Anna Smaill - This one ended up winning this year's World Fantasy award, though I hadn’t heard of it until it appeared on the finalist list. A tale of post-apocalyptic England (London/Oxford), it reminded me of both Riddley Walker and Clockwork Orange. Though there is a strong musical component to Smaill’s dystopia, it was the idea of an entire society living without long-term memory that I found most fascinating.

The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins, Antonia Hodgson - When I travel, I require a good mystery, preferably historical, for airplane reading. Hodgson delivered with this tour through the teeming streets of early 18th-century London with the ne’er-do-well Hawkins.

Sleeping Giants, Sylvain Neuvel - I read this during the Thanksgiving holiday as I was recovering from a bad cold and my partner was unconscious in the next room with the same cold that I had thoughtfully passed on to him. Despite clogged pipes in my head, I read it straight through, the pages turning quickly, curious about why the ancient alien robot hand had suddenly been discovered in South Dakota. It’s been a long time since I’ve had that kind of uncomplicated reader’s experience, and for that reason I think of this book fondly.

Swing Time, Zadie Smith - A Guardian essay by Smith on “Dance Lessons for Writers” persuaded me to seek out this tale of two mixed-race girls from London and the different paths their lives take. It’s about friendship and family, money and fame, and all the different ways of being in the world. I’m only halfway through, but I still know it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. It does very well one of my favorite things I like for books to do: tells me in intimate specific detail about lives I will never experience.

Short Fiction

I didn’t read a lot of short fiction this year, but of what I did read a few stories have stayed with me and deserve a mention.

“The High Lonesome Frontier,” by Rebecca Campbell (Tor.com) - Something about this elliptical story that follows an old ragtime song through time touched me in a way that I prefer not to analyze but only to enjoy.

“I Will Follow You” by Roxane Gay (Best American Mystery Stories 2014) - This story about two sisters who were the childhood victims of crime is unique, vivid, and kind of heartbreaking.

Also in Best American Mystery Stories 2014—edited by Laura Lippman and a solid volume overall—I enjoyed the final story, "Antarctica” by Lauren van den Berg, a mesmerizing tale of a woman who travels to a research station in Antarctica, ostensibly to collect the remains of her brother who died in an accident.

Audiobooks

I always have an audiobook on hand to help me through long drives, exercise, and cleaning the cat box. A great audiobook isn’t just about quality fiction. It has to be a story that suits the oral format, that sounds good being told, and the narration can make or break the experience, no matter how stellar the writing. The ones below are outstanding in both respects.

• The Trespasser, Tana French - Murder and secrets in modern Dublin.
 • Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier - Ghosts and gansters in 1920s Sydney.
• Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell - Horatio Hornblower goes to Japan. Plus demons.
• Wonders of the Invisible World - Chris Barzak - Magical revenge devastates generations in the American midwest.

Other

And though it’s not something I read, exactly, I was captivated by Mimi Mondal’s reading at the World Fantasy convention. Her work in progress follows a magical, traveling carnival through an alternate historical India. It had dancers, and lovers, princes, djinns, and goddesses. I can’t wait for this to be a finished thing that I can actually read.

 Alisa Alering was born in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania where she ran around barefoot and talked to the trees. Her short fiction has appeared in Mythic Delirium, Time Travel Tales, Clockwork Phoenix 4, Flash Fiction Online, and other places. She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013).  Her "The Night Farmers’ Museum" was chosen by judge Robert Coover as runner-up for the 2014 Italo Calvino Prize. Her story "Madeleine Usher Usher" appeared in Aqueduct's Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries across the Known Multiverse. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2015, pt.5: Alisa Alering

No More Bad Books—Reading Pleasures 2015 
by Alisa Alering 
 

On July 28 of this year, I decided to stop reading bad books. Which is an oversimplified way of saying that for the past few years I have been doing a lot of reading for the wrong reasons, to the point where I was turning pages like it was a duty and rarely enjoying what I read. But then I realized that I-actually-me am in charge of my reading plan—and bad books will no longer be a part of it.

A difficult book is not the same as a bad book. A book that frustrates and even infuriates in places is not necessarily a bad book (though it may be). But a book that offers me nothing, neither joy nor escape nor information nor expansion nor exploration, that is a book I don’t need anymore.

Please join me in celebrating of some of the best books I’ve discovered this year.

Hild, Nicola Griffith. I read Hild in June, and it was a large contributor in pushing me to walk out on bad books. I LOVED THIS BOOK. After I finished it, I wondered why I wasn’t having this same immersive joyful experience with other books. It slowly occurred to me that I hadn't lost the capacity to enjoy a book (as I feared), but that perhaps I was reading (all) the wrong books. I had been looking forward to Hild ever since I heard about Griffith working on it when I was at Clarion West in 2011. But then it came out in 2013, and I worried that it was too long or too epic or not enough or—whatever, shut up, I was so wrong. I adored this book. The deep narrative, the lyrical language, the descriptions of nature, the way Hild’s knowledge rises from intuition, close observation, and the natural world. Hild is an amazing character and her world is vividly drawn. I’m desperate for the next installment.

Fudoki, Kij Johnson. I’m acquainted with Kij, and I’m fairly certain that she’s not actually an aging Japanese empress. But then how, when I read this, did she make me believe in the voice of that empress so well? The two-part narrative of 12th -century Japan combines the story of cat who becomes a woman warrior and travels the length of the country and an aging empress who has barely left the Imperial Palace for her entire life. Like Hild, it's rich with historical detail and women’s lives. The fantasy elements are slight but undeniably present, which only adds to the feeling of a secret tale being whispered directly in your ear.

An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine. My friend Wendy insisted I read this book because she loved it so much. The heroine, 72-year-old Aaliya, is a bad-tempered, fiercely independent book- and music-loving misanthropist hermit in Beirut. The first-person narrative is loosely structured, weaving between her earlier life and the present day. Much of it concerns her efforts to defend her right to occupy—alone—her small apartment after being divorced by her (unlamented) husband and throughout the long years of the Lebanese Civil War. There’s a lot more to this book beyond the actual events, and I’m not really up to conveying that. Instead, I’ll let Aaliya speak for herself, and hope the first lines draw you in: “You could say I was thinking of other things when I shampooed my hair blue, and two glasses of red wine didn’t help my concentration. Let me explain…"

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, Riad Sattouf. I just finished this last night; I found it on a “best graphic novels” list circulating the internet and read it straight through. It follows the early years of the author/artist’s life as his family moves through Paris, Brittany, Tripoli, and a village in Syria. The narrative is very personal in the way that it focuses on family life and the things a child observes in his wider environment without really understanding a greater context. It reminds in me some ways of the early bits of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Here, too, the father doesn’t come off well. Valuable to me, particularly, for doing what story can do so well: placing me inside the viewpoint of places and events I would otherwise know only from the most distant outside.

Honorable mentions to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy.

In non-fiction, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal had a big impact. This is a book not so much about death as dying, and about how we’ve managed through carelessness, modernization, and fear to make that inevitable process even more terrifying—and depressing—than it need be. As someone with an aging parent (and an aging self), this book gave me a lot to think about; some of it chilling, but on the balance reassuring. To quote James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Today at lunch (eggless egg salad burritos w/ sriracha, mmmm), I embarked on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Fifteen pages in and I have a host of ideas as to what this fog-shrouded landscape really represents. I suspect that in the end, I will be both wrong and right. But the point is, I am drawn into the mystery, and I intend to follow wherever it leads.

 Alisa Alering was born in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania where she ran around barefoot and talked to the trees. Her short fiction has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 4, Flytrap #11, and Flash Fiction Online. She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013).  Her "The Night Farmers’ Museum" was chosen by judge Robert Coover as runner-up for the 2014 Italo Calvino Prize. Her story "Madeleine Usher Usher" appeared in Aqueduct's Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries across the Known Multiverse. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening, pt. 7: Alisa Alering

Verbose Victorians and Friendship Cheese: Reading in 2014

by Alisa Alering

I almost feel as if it would be somehow more honest to review the books that I meant to read this year but somehow never got around to. I read far less than I used to, though I still digest a few every month. Even so, the finished ones seem to be far outnumbered by the eternal ranks of the enticing-but-unread (not entirely dissimilar to other areas of my life.)

Choosing from the books that I have actually read or listened to over the past year, the two that I’ve enjoyed the most are Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng and A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. 

I don’t know that these novels have anything obvious in common. Everything is short and spare, focusing on the members of one family over the span of a few months, while Time Being is expansive, pursuing multiple narratives, multiple timelines, life, the universe, and everything. Yet I felt passionate enjoyment and a sense of engrossing wonder while reading both of them. 

With Everything, I was hooked from the first lines: “Lydia is dead. They just don’t know it yet.” I love mysteries, and it’s always promising when the body appears on the first page. But this is not a story about a dead girl; it’s about the shattered family left alive. They each shelter secrets, and though (mostly) well-intentioned, continue to damage each other as they flee their own pain.

Despite equally cheerful themes of suicide, disaster, and cruelty, Time Being has a more exuberant feel. The voice of teenage Nao jumps off her diary page, friendly and unruly, and I never wanted to leave her story. But I also loved Ruth’s quieter sections, her mundane concerns and her observations and interactions with the natural world.

Others novels I enjoyed:

Little Century, by Anna Keesey was given to me by a writer friend who insisted I read it so we could talk about the ending. The jacket misleadingly describes the story's events in terms of a breathless romance, as if its actual story of a young woman finding her place in the world were insufficient to captivate a reader. And my friend was right, it has an amazing final chapter that transforms and deepens every word that precedes it. 

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton - Reviewers complained that this 2013 Booker-prize winner was "long and demanding" (NYT). At 848 pages in hardcover, I can't argue with long, but demanding is in the eye of the beholder. The "verbosely Victorian style" (NYT again) goes down smoothly for one who comfort-reads the works of original verbose Victorians like Trollope. But here, instead of smoggy London, we get the wild gold-mining frontier of Hokitika, New Zealand. The landscape feels incredibly real, the characters rich and varied, and the ending leaves open the question of whether all of the seemingly supernatural events can be rationally explained.

I also had a good time with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (another Booker winner and another "grueling read" according to the same NYT article). Mantel's near-obsessive dedication to the pronoun "he" and refusal of proper names was frustrating, but there was magic in the rest. So much detail, so much interior thought. So much much. Having listened to Philippa Gregory's somewhat less exalted The Other Boleyn Girl a few years ago, the history was fresh in my mind, and it was fascinating to watch the same events unfold from the opposite side of the table.

American Elsewhere, by Robert Jackson Bennett - Horror isn't my usual cup of inky sludge, but I was

sucked in by this Shirley Jackson award-winner, largely because, for most of the book, I couldn't anticipate where it was headed. It mixes traditional Twilight Zone creepy Americana with noir tropes and bumbling criminals, a strong female heroine, X-Files-style government experiments, and oh yeah, monsters. Tor. com calls it "deliciously weird," and I have to agree.

Honorable mentions go to: Black Helicopters, Blythe Woolston; The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane; Birdbrain, Johanna Sinisalo; Night Film, Marsha Pessl; The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks; Chorus of Mushrooms, Hiromi Goto; The Golden Day, Ursula Dubosarsky; Half World, Hiromi Goto; Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (NF)

I’ve had a bit of a fad lately for biography and memoir. One of the reasons I read is because I badly want to know what’s going on in that mysterious space: someone else’s head. Fiction illuminates that wonderfully, but so too does memoir.

Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy – Grealy’s childhood cancer caused her severe physical pain and left her with a permanently disfigured face. The writing here is really wonderful, and subject not so much tragedy voyeurism as an exploration of identity. I’m now looking forward to reading Truth and Beauty, a memoir by writer Ann Patchett about her friendship with Grealy. 

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, by Anya von Bremzen - A sort of mother/daughter memoir, history of communist Russia, and cookbook combined. Food is the ship of memory and von Bremzen uses it to connect with her past whether attempting to recreate the fictional feasts of Russian literature or recalling the “Friendship Cheese” of her own Soviet-era childhood. Lots of love and irony here, and a few fascinating recipes.

Also recommended:

Country Girl, Edna O’Brien

Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn

The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett,

Things I Should Have Told My Daughter, Pearl Cleage

At the end of summer, I embarked on a short story reading and discussion campaign with a fellow writer. We’re reading everything: classic and new, literary and genre, commercial and experimental. Thanks to a Facebook poll for suggestions, we have a wonderful inventory of things to read for the rest of the year. Some favorites so far have been: 

—Benjamin Percy. “Refresh, Refresh.”

—Karen Joy Fowler. “The Dark.”

—Edith Pearlman. “Self-Reliance.” 

—Elizabeth Ellen. “Teen Culture.”

Finally, a special shout-out to recently discovered web comic “Royal Existentials.”

http://www.royalexistentials.com/

 Alisa Alering was born in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania where she ran around barefoot and talked to the trees. Her short fiction has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 4, Flytrap #11, and Flash Fiction Online. She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013).  Her "The Night Farmers’ Museum" was chosen by judge Robert Coover as runner-up for the 2014 Italo Calvino Prize. Her story "Madeleine Usher Usher" appeared in Aqueduct's Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries across the Known Multiverse. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.9: Alisa Alering

Of Time Travel, Murder, and Beautiful Chickens
by Alisa Alering

 One thing I discovered, looking back over my Goodreads inventory for highlights of my literary year, is that I didn't read as many books as usual--even counting the audiobooks I get through at a good clip on my walks around town. I've been working on my own novel this year, and the effort has exhausted my word centers. It's become ever more difficult to find a book that constitutes a pleasure: neither too difficult nor too facile, and most definitely not related in theme or voice to what I'm trying to accomplish.

While at the CSSF Novel Writers Workshop in Kansas this summer, instructor Kij Johnson mentioned that she found the cure for this malady in old favorites like P.G. Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, and Patrick O'Brian. That conversation led to my current crush on O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. I never imagined that novels about naval history would hold any interest for me, but the charm of these books lies in the characters. I’m four books in and I still don't know what a topgallant is, but I find it doesn't signify.

 In other reading, I discovered an interesting confluence in Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, both of which deal with Time Travel and The Bad Things That Happen to Women. I've long been a fan of Atkinson. I'm convinced that her entire Jackson Brodie detective series is a cumulative commentary of relentlessly feminist bent (cf. The Bad Things That Happen to Women) disguised as engaging genre stories. Her non-genre latest, Life After Life continues these themes in a different way, exploring the timeline of Ursula Todd as she lives and dies repeatedly, each time learning (if unconsciously) from her fatal mistake and living on until the next. Many of her lives are at the mercy of world events (e.g., the 1918 Influenza, WWII). But others branch from Ursula's own decisions, such as how she responds to an assault by her brother's school friend on the eve of her 16th birthday.

Beukes spreads her net more widely, focusing on the lives (& deaths) of multiple women. The "shining girls" of the title are young women of the 20th century who attract the attention of a time-traveling serial killer because they "shine" too brightly. The protagonist, Kirby Mazrachi, is a survivor who fights back. She has an older male sidekick, but she does the dirty work herself. In an interview (https://blog.zolabooks.com/lauren-beukes-the-shining-girls-qa/), Beukes says her "graphic depictions of the killer's attacks are meant to upset the reader, and to keep the reader with the victim, rather than riding voyeuristically on the shoulder of the killer." It's a laudable intent, but a risky strategy. She did make me cry while walking down the street so perhaps she pulled it off.

I also enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler's, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which seems especially relevant in light of the NIH's June decision to retire most of its laboratory chimpanzees and recent legal challenges to extend personhood rights to non-humans.

Additional shout-outs to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah; Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier--read in preparation for WisCon 37; Anna Funder's Stasiland, non-fiction stories about life in East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Elizabeth Wein's WWII-era YA thriller, Code Name Verity; and for rollicking YA supernatural silliness, Libba Bray's The Diviners.

Short stories:
• "Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken," by Elizabeth Ziemska. Interfictions 2. (2009) [reprinted in Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130729/2beautifulchicken-f.shtml]

◦ A gorgeous story of history, culture, whimsy, science, family, grief and wonder. Probably my favorite story all year.

• "The Grinnell Method," by Molly Gloss. Strange Horizons, September 3-10, 2012.

 ◦ Winner of the Sturgeon Memorial Award 2013. Lyrical, precise, naturalistic. The closely-observed details of this story stuck with me long after I finished.

• "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters," by Henry Lien. Asimov's, December 2013.

◦ Unforgettable voice, fun world-building, and my favorite thing of all: at the end of the story, the horrible little monster of a protagonist doesn't learn a single thing.

• "Holy Days," by Kodiak Julian. Writers of the Future v.29 (2013)

◦ Beautifully written examination of the consequences of some rather unusual holidays. I definitely want to see more from Julian.

• "The Metaphor of the Lakes," by Yarrow Paisley. Shimmer 17, Fall 2013.

◦ Voice, voice, and voice. This epistolary first-person narrative had me from the very first line.

Podcasts

• The always entertaining and educational Writing Excuses.

• My new fascination, Emma Newman's Tea and Jeopardy. Do join her for a spot of peril.


 TV

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (based on the novels by Kerry Greenwood), is an Australian TV series featuring a female detective in jazz-age Melbourne. Calling Phryne Fisher an independent-minded woman is a bit of an understatement. Not only does she solve murders and right wrongs, she "does exactly as she likes, does not make false promises or break hearts, and explains to her lovers that they don't own her." Though it's a bit camp overall--and ¬¬that may be part of the appeal--the first series has attempted to explore genuine social issues of the time and place. Did I mention that Miss Fisher's costume are fabulous?

Alisa Alering's stories have appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 4 (Mythic Delirium), Flash Fiction Online, and Secret Histories & Missing Links (Aqueduct Press). She is a graduate of Clarion West (2011) and winner of Writers of the Future (2013). She supervises "The Writer's Room" column for Waylines magazine. www.alering.com | @alering

The Pleasures of Reading, Listening, and Viewing in 2012, pt. 26: Alisa Alering

Reading, Listening, and Viewing in 2012

by Alisa Alering

I don't think anything I'm going to highlight here actually debuted in 2012, but that is one of the beauties of books: they don't spoil like ripe produce (well, most of them.) 

Reading:

Twitter -- which I am still of two minds about -- has done one good thing this year, and led me to the work of the strange and talented Marly Youmans. Marly hopped onto a conversation I was having with another Tweep (about pancakes, IIRC), and was so persistently clever and silver-tongued that I looked up her stories--of which there are a considerable number. Two of my favorites are:

     --"Concealment Shoes," in Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. (2006)

     --"The Incident at Agate Beach," in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 2006: 19th Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant. (2006)

Youmans’s stories have an indelible sense of place, the language of a poet (she is one), and a creepy sense of wonder. I've acquired a copy of her out-of-print YA novel, Curse of the Raven Mocker, and am looking forward to a little spooky Appalachian reading to help me through the holidays. 

I also discovered Nina Kiriki Hoffman for the first time this year, thanks to a review by Jo Walton on Tor.com. There was nothing intellectual about my enjoyment of Hoffman's trilogy, A Red Heart of Memories, Past the Size of Dreaming, and A Stir of Bones. These interconnected novels about a group of odd young people with magical abilities made that most essential of author-reader connections, seeming to flow straight out of the author's imagination and into mine without translation. Reading these books gave me back hope for parts of myself that I haven’t seen or felt for at least ten years.

Another work that really stands out from this year's reading is Kij Johnson's Fox Woman. I've read (in translation) Japanese classics like The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. Johnson does a wonderful job of creating the same tone and atmosphere for her characters--even the animal ones. A dreamy, transportingly magical work.

This past summer, I had the good fortune to take a week-long workshop with the inimitable Lynda Barry. Artist, cartoonist, novelist, playwright, teacher, and superstar of karaoke, Barry is an unstoppable fountain of inspiration and incisive humor. Her recurring characters Marlys (The Greatest), Ernie Pook, and Fred Milton Beat Poodle are waiting to improve your world. If you're unfamiliar with her work (as it seems younger people are), get acquainted via Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything which collects her early work. Also recommended: One Hundred Demons.

And now for some non-fiction: Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family, by Said K. Aburish. I had been meaning to read this 1989 book for a while now, and I'm glad I finally did. I understand times and places better through people, and this book beautifully and vividly describes the life of the author's family in a small town in East Jerusalem from the 1920s. He traces the different choices made by various members of his large family and how they individually react to changing circumstances and the advent of history. Enjoyable and informative.

Listening:

Sadly, I almost never listen to music anymore, except the execrable stuff I hear at the gym. Audiobooks and radio shows are a different story. I listen to these when I walk the dog, do the dishes, mow the lawn, clean the cat boxes....pretty much anything that requires my hands and not my brain. 

Going along with my 'history through biography' theme, I greatly enjoy the BBC Radio 4 program Great Lives. A celebrity guest (but this is Radio 4, so the celebrity is an ex-Home Secretary, a Welsh poet, or the Astronomer Royal) nominates a ‘great life’. An expert or two is rounded up, and along with host Matthew Parris, they geek out about the subject for twenty-eight minutes. Recent episodes have covered Philip K. Dick, Josephine Bonaparte, Stan Laurel, and Juvenal. The fact that all of this is not dull but fascinating is the magic of Radio 4.

Some audiobooks I enjoyed the most this year are:

--One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms & The Broken Kingdoms, Books 1 & 2 of the Inheritance Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin

--The New Republic, by Lionel Shriver

--The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente

--Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray

--Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller

Viewing:

I’ve been watching Doctor Who and Sherlock, just like everybody else.

Alisa Alering is a recent graduate of Clarion West (2011). Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Online, Every Day Fiction, and Writers of the Future, Vol.29. Her story “Madeline Usher Usher” will appear in Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries Lost, Suppressed, or Misplaced in Time, forthcoming from Aqueduct Press. She supervises "The Writer's Room" column in the new Waylines magazine. Visit her blog at http://alisaword.wordpress.com/about/ or follow her on Twitter @alering.