firecat

What are you currently reading?

P.N. Elrod, Bloodcircle (Vampire Files #3). Urban fantasy/detective-mystery. I find these books kind of interesting and calming, but some people might find them dull. The're set in the 1930s and written sort of in the style of old pulp noir novels, but they're somewhat less gritty and less sexist/racist than many of those. In this one more than the previous two, I think, there's somewhat more telling than showing, at least in the first chunk. I mean there's a lot of time spent on characters telling each other about things that happened in the past, and characters watching other characters, which isn't the usual style for genre fiction these days. The partnership between the main character and the sidekick is unusual. There's very little tension between them, and they're more or less equal partners, although with different strengths. So again that makes less opportunity for high drama than in many genre books. I like that the vampires in this series have some traditional vampiric traits along with the "drinking blood" one.

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. Hey, I just found an article about this trilogy by Joan Slonczewski, who is one of the guests of honor at Wiscon this year: "Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist's Response" in which she says

( vague spoilers )

What did you recently finish reading?

Driving Mr. Dead, Molly Harper. Paranormal romance one-off set in the Half Moon Hollow universe. Harper is a great comic writer, and some parts of the subplot about the heroine's fiancé ring true. There's something off about the characters in this one though. The vampire starts out with a certain personality and then suddenly changes to another personality, and I'm not persuaded as to why. Actually that makes me realize that characterization is just not Harper's strength in general, or perhaps I should say that her characters in general are kind of broad. (The main protagonists sometimes have more depth.)

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/799816.html

What are you currently reading?

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

Driving Mr. Dead, Molly Harper. Paranormal romance one-off set in the Half Moon Hollow universe. Harper is a great comic writer. There's something off about the characters in this one though.

What did you recently finish reading?

Once Burned (Night Prince #1), Jeaniene Frost. Audiobook narrated by Tavia Gilbert. Paranormal romance, spinoff from the Night Huntress series, featuring Vlad, a secondary character from that series. Frost writes a compelling storyline with good pacing, but I didn't like this as much as I like the Huntress books because the protagonists' points of conflict are too similar to those of the Huntress books. Unfortunate, since Vlad in the Huntress books was different from your run of the mill "centuries-old powerful vampire" protagonist...he was powerful but seemed to have a sense of humor about himself. In this book he's not that way.

Great Detective Stories (contains Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crooked Man," and G.K. Chesterton's "The Man in the Passage"), narrated by David Case.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Maybe Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine, because the OH got it out of the library.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/799161.html

What are you currently reading?

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

Great Detective Stories (contains Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crooked Man," and G.K. Chesterton's "The Man in the Passage"), narrated by David Case. David Case is one of my favorite audiobook narrators.

What did you recently finish reading?

Katherine Lampe, The Fits o' the Season. Fifth in the Caitlin Ross/Timber MacDuff series. This book relies on stuff that happens in the third (A Maid in Bedlam) and fourth (The Parting Glass) books in the series. Small-town fantasy/Paranormal romance but with a difference, in that the POV characters are human witches and shamans, not vampires/werewolves/faeries. This one is a set of interrelated shorts from Timber's point of view. Interesting magical and shamanic and violent things happen, but I especially like that it's an exploration of love for the long term, the kind you need to start building after the pedestal you stuck under your loved one crumbles. A lot of urban-fantasy/paranormal-romance books look at this from the point of view of a female protagonist, but this book looks at it from the point of view of a male protagonist.

Charlaine Harris, Grave Secret, the fourth and (so far) last in the Harper Connelly series (paranormal fantasy/mystery). Harris started this series in 2005, after her other series (although the Sookie Stackhouse series has lasted longer). Harper Connelly is a psychic with a single talent, the ability to sense corpses and know what the person died from (but if the person was murdered, she doesn't know who did it). She and her step-brother make a living by helping people using this talent. I think Harper Connelly is Harris's most interesting protagonist. This book has a mystery in it like the others, but it also delves heavily into Connelly's past and family dynamics.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Maybe Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine, because the OH got it out of the library.

What books did you acquire this week?

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (the Kindle edition was on sale for $2 last week, and a friend recommended it to me).

Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones. I don't know anything about this, but the Kindle edition was free last week, so I figured why not.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/797881.html

What are you currently reading?

Late Eclipses by Seanen McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series. I almost quit reading this series after the second one, and I'm glad I continued, because the third one was good and I'm enjoying this one a lot.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. I don't know any other writer who can creep me out so much and make me keep turning the pages at the same time.

What did you recently finish reading?

Bears Discover Fire, short story collection by Terry Bisson. The titular story broke my heart. In a good way. I guess I'm not the only one because it won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. My other favorite in this collection is "England Underway." I also liked "Over Flat Mountain," "George," "Canción Auténtica de Old Earth," "Partial People," "Carl's Lawn and Garden," "The Message," and "The Shadow Knows."

What do you think you’ll read next?

I'm having a hard time picking my next audiobook. I tried and rejected Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches. I liked some things about it but several other things irritated me and it goes really slowly. Then I tried and rejected Richelle Mead's Succubus Blues, after I'd listened to something like 10 scenes in a row involving

( vague spoilers )—it's not that I object to such scenes on principle but that was the only thing that was happening for pages and pages. Then I tried Linda Fairstein's Final Jeopardy. I found out the author was behind the conviction of the Central Park Five and that kind of made me uncomfortable. But I decided to give up after these two scenes coming one right after the other made my head explode.

( spoiler and offensive ethnic reference )

I would really like to find a good procedural series that isn't sexist, classist, racist, or fat-phobic and that doesn't rely on sexual violence against women for every single plot. Recommendations welcome.

So now I'm listening to Charlaine Harris' Grave Secret, the fourth and last in the Harper Connelly series, which is paranormal fantasy/mystery.

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she was a guest of honor at FogCon.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/797433.html

I just finished a bunch of books at once so it's time for another one of these.

What are you currently reading?

Ebook on my smart phone: Just started Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series.

Paper books:
Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson. I have only read the titular story so far. It broke my heart. In a good way, but still. I don't know if I will be able to read any of the rest.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. Am only a few pages in. It's a page-turner.

Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane Hill. Anthropology. Jane Hill is white. I thought I had an OK handle on this subject but Hill points out so many things that I wasn't aware of, and collects them into categories that make sense. She also provides a good description of the split between two theories of racism that cause problems in public conversations about racism. Now that I've read this book, I am seeing more racist language in the culture and seeing it in different ways.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson. I find Gibson's sentence- and paragraph-level writing style very creative and beautiful. His plots and characters are kind of formulaic. (But that's looking at it from OMG 26 years later. I suppose it's kind of like saying Chuck Berry is formulaic.) But I find it hard to concentrate on the plot of his books, at least in audio form. I had the same problem with the previous book in the Sprawl trilogy. This book has some interesting female characters and has characters that come from a variety of classes and ethnic backgrounds. I'm uncomfortable with the appropriation of Vodou loa, although Gibson does seem to have made some effort to research them.

Ebook on my iPad: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold. The book didn't suck me in the way the Vorkosigan books did. It took me weeks to pick my way through it. Come to think of it, that's been my experience of everything Bujold has written except for the Vorkosigan books. Well except for what I actively dislike (Sharing Knife, ick). I think part of my problem with CVA was that I thought all the other characters were far more interesting than Ivan, and I wanted stories about them, not glimpses of them through Ivan's mind. I felt that way about some of the characters in the Miles books too, but I also thought Miles was interesting.

Audiobook: Keeper of the King, P.N. Elrod & Nigel Bennett. Do you want to read an Arthurian legend? Do you want to read a spy novel? Do you want to read a vampire story? Now you don't have to choose!

But the book doesn't wrap up, it pretty much ends in the middle of a plot. I hate that. Also the audiobook is abridged; I didn't notice that until I'd finished it.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the third book in the Cat Wizards series, which is set in the same universe as the Young Wizards series. The first two books are The Book of Night with Moon, and On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service (UK title)/To Visit the Queen (US title). Duane self-published the third book as an e-book, available here: http://www.the-big-meow.com/ (Buying the e-book theoretically gets you a paperback at some point, but the paperback is over a year later than promised and the web site hasn't been updated for a while so I don't know if that's going to happen.)

This got off a pretty slow start but when the cats traveled back to 1946 Hollywood I began liking it better. She digs around in Aztec mythology quite a bit, and I don't know enough about it to have an opinion whether it's borrowing or appropriation. I feel like it has Christianish tropes too, but possibly not more than the Wizard series in general. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she was a guest of honor at FogCon.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/795817.html

What are you currently reading?

Audiobook: Keeper of the King, P.N. Elrod & Nigel Bennett. Arthurian in some way that has yet to become fully apparent.

Paper books:
Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane Hill. Anthropology. It's really excellent.

Ebook on my iPad: Still picking my way through Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. Still liking it a lot, but I mostly only read it in cars and doctors' offices so I'm not getting through it very fast (which means not too many doctors' offices. Yay!).

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: Agents of Light and Darkness (Nightside, #2) by Simon R. Green. Semi-humorous, semi-serious, enjoyably over the top. I liked this book better than the first novel in the series, which had a lot of body horror, which isn't my thing really (I just don't get scared by mucus!). In this one we get to know the characters better, and Taylor gets really obsessed with [SPOILER]. But I didn't like the ending because [SPOILERS]. I also didn't like the "character broken by [SPOILER]" plot points. Those were the wrong sorts of things to make a semi-humorous horror novel about. I bought the next one in the series.

Audiobook: Undead Sublet by Molly Harper. Novella from the collection The Undead in My Bed. In the same setting as the Nice Girls Don't series. Molly Harper does "sardonic first person paranormal" and "small town in the US South" really, really well.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she's going to be a guest of honor at FogCon.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/793387.html

What are you currently reading?

Paper books:
I read half of Redshirts by John Scalzi and gave up. I just don't like his fiction-writing style.
I've read the first four chapters of Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane Hill. Anthropology. Upsetting but really interesting and well written. I'll make a post on it later.

Ebook on my iPad: Still picking my way through Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. Still liking it a lot, but I mostly only read it in cars and doctors' offices so I'm not getting through it very fast (which means not too many doctors' offices. Yay!).

Audiobook: Agents of Light and Darkness (Nightside, #2) by Simon R. Green. This is a humorous horror series that seems like it would mainly appeal to fans of heavy-metal music...not sure I can explain what I mean by that. Well written, well narrated, in a delightfully over the top way. I'm liking this book better than the first novel in the series, Something From the Nightside. My first encounter with the series was a short story, "The Difference a Day Makes," in the anthology Mean Streets. That and "Noah's Orphans" (from the Remy Chandler series by Thomas E. Sniegoski) were the best stories in the anthology. The other stories were by Jim Butcher and Kat Richardson, neither of whom I particularly care for.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audio: "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Free short story from Audible. (Here is the link; you have to have an Audible account to get it, but I don't think you have to be a member: http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00AJ2VYRC) Well narrated by Alan Cumming.

Audiobook: Across the Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori, #1) by Lian Hearn. Lian Hearn is a pen name of Gillian Rubinstein. Most of her books are YA. This one is semi-historical fantasy set in a land an whole lot like feudal Japan after the introduction of Christianity. I started out thinking it was too full of clichés. I still think it's full of clichés, but also think they are really well done and entertaining clichés, without a lot of stuff that annoys me added on. I bought the next one.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she's going to be a guest of honor at FogCon.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/792805.html

What are you currently reading?

Ebook on my iPad: Still picking my way through Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's unusual for me to pick my way through a Vorkosigan novel instead of gobbling it. Before starting this book I didn't much care for Captain Vorpatril. I like him a little better now, but not a lot better.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. Still liking it a lot, but I mostly only read it in cars and doctors' offices so I'm not getting through it very fast (which means not too many doctors' offices. Yay!).

Audiobook: Across the Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori, #1) by Lian Hearn. Lian Hearn is a pen name of Gillian Rubinstein. Most of her books are YA. This one is semi-historical fantasy set in a land an whole lot like feudal Japan after the introduction of Christianity.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: Probability Moon, Nancy Kress. First in a trilogy. Hard SF with space opera and humans studying human-like aliens on the aliens' planet (called World). I liked the human scientist characters. They had vivid personalities. I also liked the detail about the command structure on the human warship. I didn't like the main alien character's personality (and got the impression one was supposed to like her). Maybe part of the trouble was that the narrator read her with such a monotone. I had trouble suspending my disbelief about some aspects of the people and culture on World, and that affected my enjoyment of the book. (I won't mention details here but I will in the comments if anyone asks.) Not sure if I'll read the next one.

What do you think you’ll read next?

The OH wants me to read Scalzi's Redshirts.
I also want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she's going to be a guest of honor at FogCon.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/790904.html

What are you currently reading?

Ebook on my iPad: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. It got off to a slow start, but I'm liking it a lot now that I'm about halfway through.

Audiobook: Probability Moon, Nancy Kress. I'm feeling "slightly more positive than 'meh'" about this. There's something I find annoying about the culture of the planet called World. But the scientists are turning out to have interesting personalities.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: I started Truman Capote's In Cold Blood but I hated the narration and decided that in spite of its being a classic, I don't really want to learn more about those people.

Paper book from library: A Gun for Sale, Graham Greene. Mostly similar to the film This Gun for Hire, which we liked a lot, but with some thought-provoking differences.

What do you think you’ll read next?

The OH wants me to read Scalzi's Redshirts. I'm not crazy about Scalzi's writing style but it sounds like it will be funny so I'll probably give it a try.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/788319.html

What are you currently reading?

Ebook on my iPad: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold

~~Paper book on my nightstand: The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, Philip José Farmer~~ On hold

Paper book from library: A Gun for Sale, Graham Greene. Picked this up because we recently saw a movie based on it, This Gun for Hire, which we liked a lot. One very interesting difference between the movie and the book:

( minor spoiler ) Greene explores stigma in a pretty interesting and compassionate way.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. This got off to a slow start, but I'm liking it a lot now that I'm about halfway through.

Audiobook: Probability Moon, Nancy Kress. I'm not sure I like this. It wasn't a good choice for after The New Moon's Arms because the way it starts, at least, is a lot drier. But it was the next book in the playlist and I was busy doing something when it started so I just kept going.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: The New Moon's Arms, Nalo Hopkinson. I really liked the protagonist; she's middle-aged and has a wonderfully complex personality. The narrator, Gin Hammond, is superb. I did mostly figure out the plot twist.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I almost never know what I'll pick until the time comes, but I have The Other Log of Phileas Fogg and Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood on my nightstand.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/786646.html

Last seen in

boxofdelights' journal.

What are you currently reading?

Ebook on my iPad: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold

Paper book on my nightstand: The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, Philip José Farmer

Just started those two so can't say a lot about them.

Audiobook: The New Moon's Arms, Nalo Hopkinson. I really like the protagonist; she's middle-aged and has a wonderfully complex personality. The narrator, Gin Hammond, is superb. I think I've figured out the plot twist. We'll see.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments.

What did you recently finish reading?

The Norse Myths, Kevin Crossley-Holland. It kept my interest with lots of chewy end notes. But I found his myth-writing style a little offputting. Anyway, now I'll be able to watch the Marvelverse movies with a little more background knowledge. :)

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien. Re-read because I just saw the movie.

Vampire Cabbie, Fred Schepartz. Picked it up because I liked him on a panel at Wiscon. I didn't care for it overall, but I liked the details about cab-driving.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I almost never know what I'll pick until the time comes, but I have Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood on my nightstand.

Some of the books I read this year, not in any kind of order.

Ekaterina Sedia, ed., Bewere the Night anthology. I haven't finished it but in the first 2/3 or so my favorites were "Thirst" by Vandana Singh and "The Heavy" by Cherie Priest

Ellen Guon, Bedlam Boyz. Urban/paranormal/faerie fantasy. Includes people of more than one race.

Charlie Stross, Saturn's Children. The protagonist is a sex robot with a "female" body. Mostly I avoid books like that. But I liked this protagonist because she read as genderqueer to me, although I don't think that was the intention. Nevertheless, I got bored about 1/3 of the way through.

Vernor Vinge, Children of the Sky. Third book set in the Zones of Thought universe, sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. I think the Tines are one of the best aliens there is. But there seemed to be something wrong with the pacing. I got halfway through.

Jo Walton, Lifelode. In a way it's a Le-Guin-ish type fantasy, ~~which is funny because Jo has said she doesn't like Le Guin's writing.~~ [ETA Jo corrected me on that.] I love the way time and thought work in this world. Many characters are poly. Jo works in the word "frubble" and does a great job of describing what it's like to get jealous in a poly situation and have it seem to make no sense but there it is. There's a lot of food in the book, and there should be a recipe book that comes with it.

Carolyn Gilman, Halfway Human. It's about class and gender and slavery and abuse and Stockholm syndrome and hierarchy and PTSD and sociology and psychology. It was nominated for a Tiptree. I loved most of it. The ending didn't work for me.

Nisi Shawl, Filter House. Short stories, science fiction and fantasy. She has a wonderful way of creating mystery. Bits of the stories linger in my head like dreams sometimes linger after you wake up.

Thomas Sniegoski, Dancing on the Head of a Pin (Remy Chandler #2). Remy Chandler is an angel who decided to leave heaven and become mostly human (still immortal though). He is a private eye. I like the character a lot but I keep wanting this series to go in a different direction than it is, and I don't think I'm going to keep reading it because of that. Also the writing is kind of pedestrian.

Laurell K. Hamilton, Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake #21). I have a like-dislike relationship with Anita Blake novels. I usually think large parts of them are boring for one reason or another, but I find it interesting how she keeps developing new powers. This one was boring in a new way: She doesn't get any new boyfriends or powers, and she goes on and on about polyamory and love. The part about actual vampire hunting was good because I liked her relationships with the various cops she works with.

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills. This is a very cool, hard to describe book about knowledge and certainty and belief and interdependence and werewolves.

S.J. Day, Eve of Chaos. This is a paranormal romance series. Eve is a woman who has been marked by angels to become a demon killer. Cain and Abel are angels who are romantic rivals for her. The plots have steadily gotten more convoluted and I can't keep enough interest to follow what's going on so I won't be reading more of this series.

Katherine Lampe, Caitlin Ross series (The Unquiet Grave, She Moves Through the Fair, A Maid in Bedlam, The Parting Glass). Katherine is a long-time friend and is publishing her books on Smashwords. This is what I might call a "small-town fantasy" series. Her protagonists are a married couple who are a witch and a shaman, who solve mysteries, fight people who use magic for evil purposes, etc. I really like how different they are, and she writes wonderfully.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Norse Myths. He retells some of the myths in his own style, relying mostly on the Prose Edda and some other material. There are lots of chewy end notes.

Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo Popular science about figuring out evolution through embryology. Clearly and carefully written. It won lots of awards: 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Science and Technology), 2006 National Academy of Sciences Communication Award, Top Science Books of the Year (2005), Discover Magazine; Top Science Books of the Year (2005), USA Today; 2006 Banta Prize, Wisconsin Library Association

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/784603.html

I just finished an audiobook of Minion by L.A. Banks, which is book 1 of her Vampire Huntress series. I liked it because it has people of color as characters and because the vampires are mostly of the "intelligent evil" type, which I don't see a lot of in vampire novels these days. But I didn't like the

( minor spoilers ) I also didn't like that this book didn't wrap up. It ended right in the middle of the story.

Anyway, I'm trying to decide whether to read more of the series, and I just found out there are twelve books in all. I don't want to commit to reading twelve books, but if I knew that there was an ending somewhere in the first three books I would read the next one. If every book is going to end on a cliffhanger, I'm not going to read any more.

So, do you know if the first two or three books comprise a complete story? And what do you think of the series in general?

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/783644.html

"I, for one, will put up with the occasional dull chapter in book that includes shapeshifting ferrets." (Sarah Frost's Strange Horizons review of The Grass King's Concubine by Kari Sperring)

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/781731.html

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/06/22/libraries-patrons-and-e-books/

My local library system changes how it offers ebooks and what ebooks it offers approximately every five minutes. I see it's not the only one.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/770406.html

A story of Ray Bradbury's that has always haunted me, and one that seems appropriate for the occasion, is "There Will Come Soft Rains" from The Martian Chronicles. Wikipedia links to a PDF version of the story.

His book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing is also superb.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/768650.html

Wiscon panel report: Class, Culture, and Values in SF&F
Tracks: Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing Science Fiction (Power, Privilege, and Oppression)

Description:
Class isn't just how much money you have or what work you do; it also involves cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes that are expressed in how you talk, what you do in your free time, and all sorts of less tangible elements. (See Barbara Jensen's book Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America, due out in mid-May.) The SF&F writing and fannish communities are mainly middle-class folks, which makes the class values of SF&F works mostly middle class, too. What works and creators explore classes outside the mainstream, white, European, middle-class value systems? What class markers tend to show up most, or least, often? Do these works show the non-middle classes positively? negatively? realistically?

Panelists:
Moderator: Debbie Notkin
Eleanor A. Arnason
Alyc Helms
Danielle Henderson
Rose Lemberg

[My notes aren't a complete transcription and may represent my own language rather than the actual words of the panelists. I welcome corrections. I did not identify all audience commenters by name. If you said something I paraphrased here and want your name to be used, please comment or send me a private message.]

[The book mentioned in the panel description, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America by Barbara Jensen, is available at http://cornellpress.cornell.edu/ For a 20% discount use promo code CAU6.]

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/767544.html

Untangling Class
Tracks: Power, Privilege, and Oppression (Feminism and Other Social Change Movements)

Description:
What do we mean when we talk about class? Is it about how much money we have? How much education? How we grew up? Our position with respect to a global capitalist world system? There have been a lot of WisCon panels in the past focused on speculative fiction that "does class well"—but how can we know whether something's being done well if we don't even know what it is? This panel brings together WisCongoers with expertise and experience in talking about class to hammer out (if not actually decide upon) some definitions.

Panelists (and key to my notes):
JA—Moderator: Jess Adams
BC—BC Holmes
AL—Alexis Lothian
CW—Chris Wrdnrd

[Firecat's note: Going to this panel was like walking in on an ongoing discussion, because the panelists have been discussing class together for a while, and some of the audience appeared to have been in on the discussion as well.]

[My notes aren't a complete transcription and may represent my own language rather than the actual words of the panelists. There are parts I definitely didn't catch or came out garbled, still trying to get used to my tablet's onscreen keyboard. I welcome corrections. I did not identify audience commenters by name. If you said something I paraphrased here and want your name to be used, please comment or send me a private message.]

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/767257.html

From Sherlock to Sheldon: Asexuality and Asexual Characters in SF/F
Track: Feminism and Other Social Change Movements

Panel description:
We're all familiar by now with the sexual orientations homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual. Much less discussed are asexuals, persons who do not experience sexual attraction. This panel discusses what asexuality is and is not, and proposes ways for authors to explore this overlooked orientation in their characters. Is it enough that a character has no on-page sex life, or should asexuality be more positively portrayed? Asexuality in real-time fandom and asexual characters in fiction and media may also be discussed as time allows.
#AsexualSFF

Panelists:
Jed Hartman
Liz Argall
K. Tempest Bradford, moderator
Rebecca Marjesdatter ~~[I didn't catch her last name]~~, who suggested the panel, but didn't sign up to be on it because she wasn't sure she'd make it to Wiscon. The panelists asked her to be on the panel because two assigned panelists were missing.

Tempest said that mostly the panelists would talk and for the last half hour there would be time for audience q's and comments.

[My notes aren't a complete transcription and may represent my own language rather than the actual words of the panelists. I welcome corrections. I did not identify most audience commenters by name for privacy reasons. If you said something I paraphrased here and want your name to be used, please comment or send me a private message.]

( Read more... )

I was delighted to discover that the moderators of the excellent LJ community

50books_poc, for reviews of books by people of color, have created a sister community on Dreamwidth:

50books_poc

The announcement is here along with a request for input on how people want the two communities to interact: http://50books-poc.dreamwidth.org/374.html

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firecat (attention machine in need of calibration)

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