Where You Really Need a Gun and a Horse

West of Dodge: Frontier Stories by Louis L'Amour
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second book of Louis L'Amour short stories, and I enjoyed it just the same as the first. 4 stars.

These are stories written to entertain a reader. I like that. I thought for a long time that I didn't really like short stories because the type that tend to get included in magazines that I would try (science fiction, fantasy, and a few others) apparently tend toward the literary. I'd be looking for a beginning, middle, and end, and they'd have maybe one or two but not all three. Or they'd do any number of clever, stylistic things that didn't make for satisfying stories, IMO. Crucially, they just didn't feel like the books I enjoyed in the same genre.

L'Amour isn't like that; these stories are a lot like his novels. This is regular genre fiction, where the author gives you an entertaining story with one or two characters you can get interested in. You want to read for a few minutes before bed? These stories are perfect for that. You want to cheer for a kid trying to get ahead in a tough world? Or a grown man looking for a second chance? These are the stories. I don't think you even need to be very interested in the genre to like them. Westerns probably represent about 1% of my reading, but I like this.

(Why a 4, then, and not a 5? Seems like a fair number. I guess westerns are not exactly my thing, though I liked it quite a lot. Better than I might have guessed ahead of time. Others will maybe like it a little more or a little less.)

I guess what I'm saying is this: if you know of fantasy or SF or mystery authors with short stories like this--fun, short, plot-focused stories with satisfying endings and likable characters--I would appreciate a heads-up. :)

Recommended. (Another one of brother Jon's books.)

View all my reviews

Where Everyone Deserves a Do-Over

Chronicles of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This wasn't quite what I thought it was, but I still enjoyed it.

I thought this was the third book in the series about Anne of Green Gables, and it may have been the third published, but it's not quite in the regular order. Anne barely figures here, showing up briefly in a a couple places, and these are short stories, not a novel. They take place in and around and near where the previous novels happened, but they're all new characters.

Most of them concern older people who've missed their chance at love and maybe they'll get one more shot at it. A couple deal with adopted kids, people taking in a child (rather like Anne) who changes their lives. All of the stories are about families, about people who are lonely, about people who push others away, and about making new families that bring us joy or peace or happiness. Like the first novels, these stories are a mix of regret and despair and sadness on one hand and the possibility of joy and hope and happiness on the other.

What surprises me most about the stories is that they could, any or all of them, become cloying, too saccharine, and maybe some have leveled that claim, and while I find them decidedly sweet, they are not over-sweet. They're touching, but they keep the people real. Complex characters--flawed, normal people who are sometimes grumpy, foolish, intimidated, proud, or rude--are reaching for a little happiness, and it doesn't feel (to me) like it's unreasonable or unbelievable. Melodramatic, maybe, yes. But real for all of that.

So I still liked it. I would rather see Anne in the stories, because she is the incredible creation of the author that is so easy to cheer for and follow around, almost a patron saint of seeing the beauty in the world, but these quick stories are still very much in the same vein.

Four stars. Recommended.

View all my reviews

Where the Good Guys Earn Their Wins

War Party by Louis L'Amour
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't often read Westerns, but my dad really liked Louie L'Amour, and I've enjoyed reading a couple of them. This was pretty good, too.

I was surprised when I got into it that this was a book of short stories. I didn't even know L'Amour wrote short stories. I'm not actually an avid reader of short fiction--especially with so many that I've read lately in SF or fantasy being unsatisfying and strange. (YMMV.) These were not like that. These stories had a clear beginning, middle, and end, with exciting action and heroes to root for. That makes them easy to start and easy to finish, and not too long, just the right thing before bed.

The author favors stories of boys stepping into their father's shoes too young; of men left on their own to face dangers bigger than themselves; and of women learning to see the good in a rough man. The morality is pretty straightforward, with only a few small exceptions, and that's part of the charm of the stories. There's plenty of violence and loss here, lots of hardship and pain, but the stories focus on the kernel of hope that the survivors cling to, kinda like a little Western Chicken Soup for the Soul, and that's a pleasure to read now and again.

Recommended for Western readers, of course, but also those who think they might like the genre but want an easy intro. This fits the bill.

View all my reviews

Awesome Galaxy-Spanning Space Opera

Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

The end.

Seriously, I loved this collection. I found it at the dollar store (the fate of overlooked good books every day) and it really didn't deserve to end up there. Although I haven't read many galaxy-spanning space operas in years, I used to love them. I used to read them in preference to fantasy or mystery, which are my go-to genres now. But this collection makes me want to get back into it, and it gives me a bunch of names and series and titles to go hunt up.

This is a mix of reprints and new stories, though it's leaning towards new. A few of these are quite old, golden age stuff, including stories by Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, C.L. Moore, and E.E. Doc Smith. Some are from the years between, like stories by James Blish and George R.R. Martin. Then there's a scattering from the 90s and 2000s. But there's a bunch from around 2019, when the anthology came out, including several that tie in to series that are already popular, maybe filling a gap between novels. I think that's cool. It's a good balance, and I generally liked the older ones about the same as the new ones.

In fact, there are only two or three stories here that I didn't really love. All the rest were fun, and a few were awesome. IMO. But I was surprised by that.

TBH, when I have tried in the last decade or two to read SF short stories in magazines, I feel like I'm being tricked, because I almost never like them. They always feel incomplete, or only bad things happen in them, and they're not fun. YMMV, obviously. But I've given up on the magazines; they're clearly for a different kind of reader. But I thought that mean I didn't like SF short stories at all. If this book hadn't been a dollar, I doubt I'd have ever picked it up. Then it knocked it out of the park for me. The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell sounds great. I'm intrigued by the Wayfarers Universe of Becky Chambers. Tanya Huff I already knew, but now I'm curious about her SF series. Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife series looks very cool. And on and on. Lots of tips for future reading.

That is kinda the point of an anthology, though, isn't it? Yes, you want it to be a success all on its own. But then you want to point the reader to a bunch of other good stuff that they've been missing out on. And it sure worked that way for me.

5 stars. If you like SF, especially space opera (and maybe military SF, too) you should enjoy this as much as I did. Recommended.

View all my reviews

Where I Get Some Questions Answered

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My only real interest in this book is that it was a gift from a friend who wanted to read it and discuss it over coffee or something, and I think that's a fine thing. I did it.

But on my own, I would have never read this or the stories discussed in it. I'm glad I did, for reasons I'll explain, but it was a slog. It took me waaaaayyy to long.

I like the author, or what I can glean of him (seems like a lot) from this discussion. Intelligent. Pleasant. Considerate. Genuinely interested in sharing his love of reading and writing with others. I applaud that. And I think he does a very good job at explaining some things I've been wondering about, so I could give him a five for those things. But I still really really don't like--actively dislike--the stories he's loving, even at the end, and for all of them I'd give a 1. However, I must stress the following: that is my opinion. I do not care to persuade anyone to join me in holding the same opinion. (*If you're curious, though, see below.)

Skippable section on opinion, but I enjoyed writing this, so you do you

Here's my passionate take on that topic: an opinion about art--in this case short stories, or literature more broadly--is a real thing, a genuine, significant, personal matter, one that indicates a meaningful truth about yourself. It might or might not be interesting to others. It might or might not guide some other people's reading. And it can be fun to discuss with others, even debate, sharing insights and interpretations. But that opinion is not right. It isn't possible for it to be right. Nor is it wrong. It's a kind of truth, but not one that stretches across the space between us. A private truth, perhaps.

Very often, critics try to make a case for their perspective on some matter, on some story, attempting to bridge that gap between individual minds, triumphing over mere belief, rendering an opinion so durable that everyone can call it Truth. I don't believe that's possible. In fact, I insist that it is not possible, by definition. I hold that this kind of judgment, no matter how erudite, no matter how glossy, is just very shiny opinion that can never become Judgment. There is no trump card; no professor can say "I am right so listen," nor can a publisher or a literary lion or the most successful critic on booktok. You can't weave straw into gold, nor can you weave opinions into facts.

An author I adore, a writer of genre fiction but also a lover of literature, has often argued in social media that some writers and some literature are simply better than others, and he points to classics like Greek drama to say how plainly they are superior to whatever popular literature you might name. (He does not exclude his own writing, I might add. He is consistent.) I once pushed back, asking better for what purpose? (My contention as a teacher is that I can get more buy-in and participation from a class full of reluctant readers with a YA novel or Twilight or a Dan Brown thriller or [fill in a book or author mocked by Very Smart People] than I ever could with Aristophanes' Frogs or any classic you might name. Could I teach that other stuff? Yes, of course, I had to do it many many many times. But it's hard and it's dry and it turns kids off to school, even when you use every trick available to teacherkind. It's prejudice and magical thinking ("a good teacher could get them excited about Hemingway...") and it has never worked. I'd rather get a bunch of young students engaged in reading a Goosebumps book than waste their time dragging them unwillingly through Ethan Frome again or some other book that makes them lose their minds.)

Anyway, I exceeded his patience in debating the topic and he didn't reply. That's cool.

But the subjectiveness of opinion is a basic idea that can't be defeated by Superior Knowledge or Greater Success in Literature or any other marker of personal worth. Opinions just will never be facts, and someone's opinion will never be better than someone else's. The value in any work is the value the individual reader finds in it. Any hierarchy people think they can perceive in the collected works of literature from around the world is an illusion propped up by vanity, especially those endorsed by white supremacists and other deep lovers of the Western Canon. [My caveat--all such works are worth discussing and possibly studying to trace the history of literature, which is a worthwhile topic, but I absolutely repudiate the notion that they should be used exclusively because they are the Best Writing Available, or the Best Models, or whatever argument you might see.]

My final thought on that can be summed up by this simple advice: like what you like.

Back to the book, finally

Reading this book by George Saunders brought all of these thoughts to mind because I have often wondered why people like books and stories that I absolutely do not. I also wonder why they are so often held up as the very best in literature when I find them much less to my taste than almost anything. [I tried to like Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a Booker Prize-winning novel, and I hated it. Stopped reading for a year. Started again. Hated it. Finished it. Hated it. Readers online: "My favorite novel ever!" WTF?] I've finished a number of books that had me thinking the same thing: Sterne's Tristram Shandy; several books by Faulkner; Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel; and some others. People love them. I hated them--if you will forgive the strong expression. But the discussion throughout this book, looking at Russian short stories, describing ways to analyze them, noticing things, trying out theories, attempting to piece together the author's purpose, asking why the author made the choices he did--I sort of get it now. It's a scavenger hunt, an attempt to solve a mystery, trying to solve the puzzle of how the author's mind is working. It is necessarily--at least speaking of the analyses offered by Saunders here--a metacognitive approach to reading. What am I seeing? Why is it here? Why did the author choose that? What is he trying to make me see? What conjectures can I make about the meaning of this work? How well has he achieved his aim?

And so on.

None of those questions are the reason I read, however, any more than I watch movies to analyze the cinematography. And the stuff I do read might not yield interesting results if put to these particular tests. It's like listening to my favorite indie bands only to have someone say that they are terrible to dance to. Well... I'm not trying to dance. That's the wrong question to ask this music. Other genres work well for that. This is something else.

To connect this all to my diatribe on opinion versus fact (or judgment), I believe that some readers will totally love what he does here, and will enjoy Russian short stories (in particular) or literary fiction (in general) as much as he does, and will see in all of this valuable lessons in writing their own stories. I will not. Our opinions are not compatible. That does not make any of this less true for those other people. They can Like What They Like, just as I will.

So I learned some things. I will not be reading any more Russian literature. Life is short. But if you like it, go for it. If you like literary fiction in general, read it all you want. I'm not even cynical about it, and I'm not being sarcastic. If you like it, it's good.

Same for all of us, whatever we're reading.

_________________________________________

*[Why don't I like these stories? In simple terms, they are dreary. A downer. They make me sad. I don't have room in my emotional life for art that only wounds. Nothing good happens--except for a moment, sometimes--but that moment is followed by things like early death, bad marriage, physical abuse, hopelessness, alcoholism, missed opportunities, injustice, and depression. Some of it is ugly. But there is no payoff, no resolution, no correction, no possibility for happiness. I hate all of that. It's like watching replays of your favorite sport, but only the ones where your team loses. How is this fun? That has been my question. I feel like I've had it answered to some extent.]

View all my reviews

Where I Enjoy an Author I Have Long Overlooked

Eight Fantasms and Magics by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another cast-off book I picked up from the school library years ago. I left it on my shelf for a long time--in class and at home--before I opened it up, and it turns out it's pretty good. A very even collection.

Vance has kind of a dark view of our future, both for earth and for people, and some of the stories are kinda sad and dreary for that reason, though I still found them satisfying and interesting. Others are a tad more hopeful and just very cool. All of them are deeply original and creative.

My favorite is the one called "Telek," set in a future where a fraction of humanity develops telekinesis to the point that they become wealthy rulers--able to bring back treasures from anywhere in the universe--and they live in a cloud city from which they control the entire population. It kinda reminds me of humans and fairies, but it still feels more like science fiction than fantasy. Told from the perspective of downtrodden common humans trying to take back some control over their lives, plotting a one-shot-at-this-thing uprising, it is compelling and engaging and a little frightening. It has a great ending, too. I recommend hunting this one up. (It's found in several other collections, so it's not that obscure.)

"The New Prime" starts out like a series of dream stories, especially with the first scene being a man waking up naked in a wedding, trying to figure out how he got there and how to proceed. It slides into the story of a platoon of soldiers going up against a hive of giant aliens, then slips into a search through a long-abandoned ruins in the desert, then leads us into a disorienting art competition, with contestants creating images and movies on giant screens for an audience using only their minds, before taking the reader to another kind of battle with the first person protagonist being captured and tortured without end. All of these vignettes make sense in the final portion of the story, when we see how they were all the same person, somehow, and his performance has a score attached. Wildly inventive.

I have never read Jack Vance, though I've seen his books all over for decades. Having enjoyed his short stories, guess it's time I try some of his greatest hits. I'll gladly accept recommendations.

This is a fun collection. Still exists on eBay, for those who enjoy SF of the 50s and 60s.

View all my reviews

Where I Take a Sip From a Near-Forgotten Well

Creatures of the Cosmos (Pern by Catherine Crook de Camp
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books I never would have owned if it had not been set out at the high school where I taught, left for the taking as a discard. It lived briefly in my classroom library then came home with me forever--

--where it sat for a long time until recently when I opened it on a whim.

What I forget about many such collections is that they are pretty fun to read, and that they're designed to be the right length to read at a single sitting. That's what I found here. The stories are aimed sort of at young people, and there is nothing technical or sophisticated about any of these stories, but that doesn't mean they're not interesting or have no impact. On the contrary.

"The Bear Who Saved the World" is an uplift story told from the bear's point of view. "Old Man Henderson" gives us a near future where the kind, elderly hero of moon landings is treated as a bore by younger generations who have grown up accustomed to the wonder of space travel. "The Million Dollar Pup" is the story of a handy young girl and an elderly mentor inventing a robotic pet where dogs and cats are outlawed. "The Smallest Dragonboy," the most fantasy-like of the collection, is the story of a bullied underdog coming up big. "The Large Ant" is a first-contact story where we find that humanity's first instinct is violence. "Dead Man's Chest" tells about following a treasure map to a Lovecraftian horror. "Socrates" is the melancholy story of a sweet dog born with human intelligence. And "The Horse Show" tells about a nerdy boy learning confidence from the horse-like creature he brings back from a distant planet.

TL;DR--All of the stories center on an animal or pet or creature, though the character of the creatures and the tone and vibe of every story was quite different.

These stories are all simple, in a way. Quick reads. Limited characters. But they all have surprising depth, leaving the reader to ponder the nature of other intelligences--bears, alien ants, alien horses--and whether they might not be kinder and more generous than we are. They cause one to consider the significance of pets and why we want to lavish our love on them, as well as wonder whether those animals, on the whole, are better or worse off for that attention. They make one think about how small man is compared to the universe. And so on.

On another level, this collection makes me think about all the stories written over the years, the ones showing up in magazines and Hugo-winners collections, where they are read by a few people and then forgotten. Most of the stories are from the 50's and 60's, and one comes from 1938, so that even when the collection was published in 1977, they were being brought back from oblivion. It's nobody's job to keep them alive, I suppose, but it still makes me kinda sad to imagine them languishing in silence on increasingly obscure bookshelves...

I won't try to make the case that there's anything essential here, and this exact book is probably of limited interest to most readers. It's a little dated, obviously. (The words "rocket ship" are used unironically by the authors. It's like that.) This is just one collection, like a hundred or thousand others, which have been mostly forgotten. Any of them might be worthy of opening up if you happen on it, but are not really worth hunting down. However, I wouldn't mind someone else reading these 60-, 70-, 80-year-old stories and comparing their thoughts with mine.

That would be welcome.

View all my reviews

Where I Enjoy Some Fantasy Short Stories

The Tangleroot Palace: Stories by Marjorie M. Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's not often I pick up a book of short stories, but this was a gift and it had a cool cover, so I gave it a shot.

I liked it.

I didn't like all of the stories equally, TBH, but I liked a couple of them a lot, especially the title story, so gathering like terms and solving for X--it averaged out to quite good.

The stories are so different that there is little that can be said that applies to all of them. The tone varies by story, and the settings vary from post-apocalyptic to near-future to alternate-history China to pure fantasy, and the characters are just as varied. Perhaps the most consistent theme is fear of the dark woods, followed by young women struggling to find their place in the world. Often, they find their answers in the woods.

That works.

(My daughter bought this for me at Powell Books in Portland, which I haven't had a chance to visit yet. So this book is my connection to that magical place.) :)

View all my reviews