books

[snugglekitty]

Book nine for the year was Knitting Heaven and Earth by Susan Gordon Lyon. I loved her book Knitting Sutra - it was the first book on knitting and spirituality that I liked, and there are dozens of them out there. It was part of a birthday present from redjo, but I misplaced it about halfway through reading it and only found it when cleaning the house two weeks ago. Oh, it was so good. Lydon talks about her journeys through craft as she struggles with addiction, the death of her father, and breast cancer. I loved it. Five stars.

Then I went on to read some trashy fiction.

Next we have The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz. It was originally published in 1966 but doesn't really read that way. It prefigures more recent works that have published in the cracks between sf and fantasy - it has both spaceships and magic. (My beloved Liaden books serve as a good example of this trend, explaining why the term "speculative fiction" is coming into use.) I liked it, and I would give it four stars. I don't know whether to wait before reading the new "sequel" written by Lackey and co. Not sure how that will work out. Sequels by other people can be spotty, but I like the authors, and the first book set up enough of a pattern that I think it could work... we'll see.

Then I went on the The Awakening by LA Banks. This series has the premise, "What if Buffy were a hip hop artist?" Much of this book was devoted to "explaining how things worked" in terms of who is on what level of Hell. It talked about demons being nourished by our bad thoughts and bad thoughts leading to wickedness. A pretty traditional idea, but one that doesn't account for the fact that even good people (ie who do good things) have bad thoughts. The idea that women can save men by believing they can change was also far too important to the book. (Imagine me pointing down my throat to understand my feelings about that idea.) There was too much worldbuilding and not enough ass-kicking, but it was still better than the previous book. Three stars, and I will go on reading them, and that was book eleven for the year.

In exciting news, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have announced they're writing a sequel to The Tomorrow Log. Yippee! I loved that book, and I can't wait for the sequel. Or for Crystal Dragon, the sequel to Crystal Soldier, which I so-regrettably did not pre-order but which should be out in a few weeks.

Comments

knitting and spirituality

[trouble4hire.livejournal.com]

have you read "Zen and the art of knitting" or "The knitting goddess?" Minuteman has both of them. I was doing some searches for art/spirituality books and thought of you when I saw the titles.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Next we have The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz.

Have you read the Telzey books by James H. Schmitz? If not, you might want to try them. I find them quite lovely, especially for their era. Schmitz was making strong female characters at a time when most other male SF authors had women making coffee. Telzey is a telepathic young woman with a telepathic alien catlike creature, and she gets into a number of adventures and manages to save the world and do the other stuff that heros do, all while going to law school. She is undercover as a telepath, since she doesn't want to be forced to serve the government, which provides some of the tension in the series. The library should have them, and they also recently came back into print in a couple of compilation volumes.

I read the sequel to Karres, and while it's not completely awful, it doesn't hold a candle to the original.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

I read the sequel to Karres, and while it's not completely awful, it doesn't hold a candle to the original.

I'm not at all surprised. Karres was so... original. Every time you thought you knew where the plot was going, it went off in a completely different direction. And I do enjoy reading Mercedes Lackey, but she just doesn't have the skill of being unpredictable. Far from it, really.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

P. S. -- I just read a book that might interest you, if you haven't read it already. It's called Leaving the Saints, by Martha Beck.

Beck was raised Mormon, and her father was a very famous Mormon apologist. She recovers memories of being sexually abused by him, which have confirming evidence in the scars that her gynecologist finds inside her. She freaks out majorly when the memories start coming back. She goes through hell in processing the memories and in talking about sexual abuse in a Mormon context. She eventually decides to stop being a Mormon and to leave Utah for Arizona. In the course of all of this, she becomes a lot less interested in being nicey-nice and a lot more interested in being her true self. She ultimately becomes so fully herself that she's practically a force of nature, and her battle with the Mormon church and with sexual abuse results in a very personal triumph.

The scenes of sexual abuse that she recovers in memory are not really graphic, so the book isn't as upsetting as it might be in that regard. The portrait she paints of the Morman hierarchy resembles the society George Orwell created in 1984, so it's scary and infuriating, but since you know she lived to make this book (which is very funny in spots, in spite of all she's been through), you know from the start that she survives with her spirit way, way more than intact.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

I'll give it a try, thanks. :)

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

If you do get around to reading it, I'd be interested to hear what you think of it.

My husband was nearby when I was reading part of it, and I laughed out loud so much that he had to read it, too, even though it's not his usual type of book. Anybody who can make tyrrany and sexual abuse funny has to have some sort of special gift. (Which is not to say that she's trivializing any of this, just that her way of taking the power away from the bullies is to laugh at them and to invite us to laugh along with her.)