Literature

PASADENA, Calif. — Usually, Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, California, is filled with books. The walls are lined with titles on dark brown shelves, and customers can buy candles and other small goods, too. But for the past two weeks, the Black-owned bookshop has been packed wall-to-wall with supplies like bottles of water, hygiene products, clothes and food that are given away for free to locals impacted by the ongoing wildfire in the area.

“The focus has always been serving the community and that means different things at different times. Right now it means something other than books,” Kiki Williams, manager of the bookstore, said.

The history of book bans in the US goes back to 1637 but has recently increased dramatically, nearly 200% during the 2023-24 school year. This rise is driven by conservative policies claiming many books have themes that go “against” American history. But are these books really problematic? The World’s Lex Weaver shares her experience attending a banned-book symposium hosted by Morgan State University in Havana, Cuba, where authors and historians discussed their worries about the future of education.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18023674

Paywall bypass: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/puBWi

Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the “otherness” of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences. Much like structural racism, it’s more systemic than individual, though individual actions certainly uphold or subvert its existence. An illuminating case study of diversity syndrome in the real world is that of Black authors of what I’ll broadly define as speculative fiction.

A word, first, on genre and race. The term “speculative fiction” has contested definitions: here, I use it to mean anyone whose written imagination is located in the fantastic, whether that’s represented in New York City with six people functioning as avatars of the boroughs (N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became) or in an interstellar hunt for the meaning and translation of a language whose fundamental quality is change (Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17). When it comes to race, I’m a Black writer of speculative fiction—I enjoy examining the experiences of those working in my preferred genre. But beyond that, I think both Black authors of any genre and speculative fiction authors of any race have two of the most glaringly obvious experiences of diversity syndrome.

When readers pick up work by Black authors of speculative fiction expecting it to be centered on the authors’ identities, or approach these authors with questions confined to specific racial or genre-based expectations, they are pigeonholing the authors and limiting their own ability to experience the richness of these narratives. These authors are frequently specialists at crafting stories that are intensely meaningful to our current reality without trying to “make a point” as Black authors, something the social impacts of diversity syndrome might indicate they should aim to do; we should really be trying harder to understand that Black speculative literature is much bigger than just Black.

This past year was as dismaying as it was disorienting (as was the year prior, as will be the year to come). As we collectively drown in a daily deluge of disinformation it is to books that we turn for something like an anchor to truth—facts still matter, and reality is still there to be witnessed. The following 50 books are just some of the texts that helped Lit Hub editors better understand the world as it is, and, perhaps, where it might be headed.

“Skeletons of the Gods” is a dark fantasy/horror tale about the man, who always wanted to be someone better, than he was. I invite You to read: https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/skeletons-of-the-gods-short-story/ or listen to: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nk5RprPrkiU And here is the fragment.

Thousands of years ago, in a certain kingdom in the far south, there lived a man who always wanted more than he had… wanted to be more than he was. His name has been erased from the records, but the wise people who know this story call this man “The Insatiable One.” He was born into a family of servants of a nobleman. His parents trained him from an early age to take their place one day. They always told him, “Look how lucky you are! You could have been a slave on some plantation, but you are a servant in a rich man’s house! Moreover, such a good man. He lets us eat the leftovers from his table and only beats us when he gets really angry. You will have a real paradise with him!” But this young man was not satisfied with the scraps from the master’s table. He wanted to have everything his master had… And more. But he had no idea how to get it. Years passed, the Insatiable One’s parents grew old, and he passed out of adolescence. He took his father’s place and became the most trusted servant in the house. This gave him access to every nook and cranny of the large household. One day, while cleaning his master’s bedroom, he came across a scroll hidden under his pillow. He immediately took it in his hands, unfolded it and began to look through it. He mastered the art of reading enough to understand the general meaning of the written words. And these were extremely significant words. The lord of the house conspired with another nobleman, an aristocrat from an ancient family, against the prince ruling the province! Insatiable One was shocked, but after a while the feeling turned into excitement. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for for so many years! He could finally rise above his miserable existence… Over the corpse of that wretched, fat pig he had to serve!

This web serial, along with its sequel 20020: The Future of College Football (both by Jon Bois), explores forms of American football in the far future that are extremely different from today's football. (If you aren't particularly into sports in general or American football in particular, don't be put off—I know basically nothing about sports, but I had no trouble understanding the story and finding it entertaining). What I like most about the web serial is its depth. It was very clearly meticulously thought out and researched, including various interesting little tidbits of local history and geography. I get the sense that the world, and people's lives, contain so many stories and so many possibilities that it's inconceivable to comprehend even a thin slice of what's out there. Give it a read!

After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time.

The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success -- not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.

If Viv wants to put the blade behind her and make her plans a reality, she won't be able to go it alone.

But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travelers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have dreamed.

"Take a break from epic battles and saving the world. Legends & Lattes is a low-stakes fantasy that delivers exactly what's advertised: a wholesome, cozy novel that feels like a warm hug. This is my new comfort read."--Genevieve Gornichec, author of The Witch's Heart

Gornichec is goofin', there are at least 4 epic battles in the series.

If you are looking for some lighter fare to dive into due to present stressors in the world, and you enjoy fantasy genre stuff, this is the book for you. So unfortunately for myself, I read both this book and the prequel already. If you have read these already, perhaps you could recommend something fun in the same vein?

A note for some readers: Some people get thrown by the "romance" tag that many have filed these under. They are tame. There are romantic plot elements, not sex scenes. Content is PG-13 and written so that the very prude can feign total ignorance.

Following is synopsis of Justus Rosenberg's book on Kobo's shop. Thanks to @[email protected] for reminding me of this text with your previous relevant post. The book itself is both pretty entertaining (Justus is a very good story teller AND IT'S SHORT) and you know, sobering and terrifying in that whole "witness to man-made horrors beyond all comprehension" kinda way.

“Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jew’s flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in the French underground.” —USA Today

An American Library in Paris Book Award “Coups de Coeur” Selection

In 1937, after witnessing a violent Nazi mob in his hometown of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent by his Jewish parents to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, the Nazis came again, as France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, Justus fled Paris, heading south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille who led a clandestine network helping thousands of men and women—including many legendary artists and intellectuals, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst—escape the Nazis. With his intimate understanding of French and German culture, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s operation as a spy and scout.

After the Vichy government expelled Fry from France, Justus worked in Grenoble, recruiting young men and women for the Underground Army. For the next four years, he would be an essential component of the Resistance, relying on his wits and skills to survive several close calls with death. Once, he found himself in a Nazi internment camp, with his next stop Auschwitz—and yet Justus found an ingenious way to escape. He spent two years gathering intelligence, surveying German installations and troop movements on the Mediterranean. Then, after the allied invasion at Normandy in 1944, Justus became a guerrilla fighter, participating in and leading commando raids to disrupt the German retreat across France.

At the end of the Second World War, Justus emigrated to America, and built a new life. After decades teaching literature at Bard College, he now adds his own story to the library of great coming-of-age memoirs, a “gripping” chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Wikipedia TL;DR

Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1926–27 and told as a third-person narrative, with only the opening pages written in the first person. The book was written in the context of the Harding administration's Teapot Dome Scandal and takes place in Southern California. It is a social and political satire skewering the human foibles of all its characters.

The main character is James Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny, son of an oil tycoon. Bunny's sympathetic feelings toward oilfield workers and socialists provoke arguments with his father throughout the story. The beginning of the novel served as a loose inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.

My Take: Basically the TL;DR is that Oil companies have been buying politicians and stalling progress while their actions destroy the lives of untold masses forever. This book is like 100 years old, so that means it has been a big enough problem to write a whole pulpy novel about it for longer than any of us will ever live. Corporations are bad. Great characters and retro cultural obscura!

Linked below is an excellent copy by Standard Ebooks you can legally have for free if you also want to be mad about the oil industry and capitalism more broadly.

Oil! 🌋 Upton Sinclair

Children's reading enjoyment has fallen to its lowest level in almost two decades, with just one in three young people saying that they enjoy reading in their free time, according to a new survey.

Only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds surveyed by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) said that they enjoy reading in their spare time. This is the lowest level recorded by the charity since it began surveying children about their reading habits 19 years ago, representing an 8.8 percentage point drop since last year.

It is also part of a broader downward trend since 2016, when almost two in three children said that they enjoyed reading.

I have been listening to the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, which picks a sound or music (eg music of Hans Zimmer) and the host recommended another podcast called Imaginary Worlds. I cannot get enough of it. The host picks a topic and usually has guests to discuss it (eg Terri Pratchett’s Discworld, or how Norse mythology permeates present day).

The show tickles my sense for philosophy by asking really open-ended and thought-provoking questions. And the host quite often has a books or movies that I would have never otherwise heard of, such as Octavia Butler- Lilith’s Brood (aka Xenogensis) and Dora Raymaker - Resonance; which explore the experiences of black and autistic authors, respectively, and how that shapes the stories they create.

Not many things prompt me to think outside of the box like this show. I just wanted to share, in case anyone else could enjoy it as much as I am.

For the uninitiated, “shipping,” or the act of creating a romantic pairing between two people or characters who may not already be romantically involved, may seem like an uniquely internet phenomena.

But really, it IS the stuff of legend. From today’s Tay/Trav, to Shakespeare’s Romeo/Juliet, to Homer’s Achilles/Patroclus, to Adam/Eve. Romantic shipping (denoted by the “/”) is practically biblical.

It's human nature to pair Human A and Human B (and possibly Human C, D, etc.) together and hope for the best. But how do we collectively decide WHO gets shipped?

We set out to try to answer that question by looking at 11 years of Archive of Our Own (AO3) data compiled by centreoftheselights.

archive.is link

Mine is Becky Chambers. I've just finished rereading all of her work, and it gave me the exact same feeling of hope I had the first time. Not groundbreaking, but soul-feeding.

Publishers are complaining that people prefer to read the novels in English instead of their native tongues.